Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy 9781501722141

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Abbreviations
Introduction: Post-Fascism/Fascism: Italy I994/I922
1. Interpreting Fascism/Explaining Ritual
2. Imagining a New Political Community: The Landscape of Ritual Action
3. Convergence and Commemoration: Reenacting the March on Rome
4. The Evolution of Ritual Genres: The March Continues
5. Colonizing Time: Rhythms of Fascist Ritual in Verona
6. Dead Bodies and Live Voices: Locating the Fascist Self
Conclusion: Fascism/Identity /Ritual
Methodological Appendix
Index

Citation preview

Making the Fascist Self

THE WILDER HOUSE SERIES IN POLITICS, HISTORY, AND CULTURE

The Wilder House Series is published in association with the Wilder House Board of Editors and the University of Chicago. A complete list of titles appears at the end of this book. David Laitin and George Steinmetz, Editors Editorial Board: Andrew Apter Prasenjit Duara Gary Herrigel Steven Pincus Martin Riesebrodt William Sewell Dali Yang

MAIZING THE FASCIST SELF THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF INTERWAR ITALY MABEL BEREZIN

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 1997 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1997 by Cornell University Press. Printed in the United States of America Cornell University Press strives to utilize environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are also either recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berezin, Mabel. Making the fascist self : the political culture of interwar Italy / Mabel Berezin. p. em. - (The Wilder House series in politics, history, and culture) Includes index. ISBN o-8014-3202-2 (cloth: alk. paper)-ISBN o-8014-8420-o (pbk: alk. paper) 1. Italy-Politics and government-1992-1945. 2. Mussolini, Benito, 1883-1945-Influence. 3· Fascism-Italy-History. 4· Fascism and culture-Italy-History. 5. Symbolism in politicsItaly-History. I. Title. II. Series. DG571.B444 1997 306.2'0945'09041-dC21 96-53410

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This book is a print-on-demand volume. It is manufactured using toner in place of ink. Type and images my be less sharp than the same material seen in traditionally printed Cornell University Press editions.

Alta memoria della mia madre e mio padre, con riconoscente affetto.

Contents

Acknowledgments Chronology Abbreviations Introduction: Post-Fascism/Fascism: Italy I994/I922 I.

Interpreting Fascism/Explaining Ritual

lX Xlll XV

I II

2. Imagining a New Political Community: The Landscape of Ritual Action

39

3· Convergence and Commemoration: Reenacting the March on Rome

70

4· The Evolution of Ritual Genres: The March Continues

IOI

5· Colonizing Time: Rhythms of Fascist Ritual in Verona

I4I

6. Dead Bodies and Live Voices: Locating the Fascist Self

I96

Conclusion: Fascism/Identity/Ritual

245

Methodological Appendix

2 53

Index

26I

Vll

Acknowledgments

During the years from I 990 to I 99 5 when I was researching and writing this book, I benefited from the sponsorship of several organizations. The National Endowment for the Humanities (Travel to Collections), the American Philosophical Society, the University of Pennsylvania Center for Italian Studies (Salvatori Research Grant), and a University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation Grant funded trips to Italy in the summers of 1990, 1991, and 1992. In Italy, Doctor Marina Giannetto, director of the Sala di Studio of the Central State Archives in Rome, was unfailingly courteous and helpful. The staffs of the National Libraries in Florence, Rome, and Verona fulfilled my innumerable requests for microfilms and photocopying. I wrote this book while I was a member of the Sociology Department of the University of Pennsylvania. Junior Faculty Leave for the academic year 1992-I993 provided the free time to draft Chapters 3, 4, and 6. During that period, I was a Visiting Fellow at the Minda De Gunzberg Center for European Studies of Harvard University and the Sociology Department of Harvard. Guido Goldman, director of the Center, and Abigail Collins, associate director, provided office space and resources during the summers of 1992 and I993· Peter Marsden, chair of the Harvard Sociology Department, facilitated access to departmental resources and made it possible for me to have a Widener Library card for the entire period. I thank all of them for making my time at Harvard rewarding. I completed the revisions of the manuscript in the summer of r 9 9 5 supported by a grant from the German Marshall Fund of United States. I corrected the copyedited manuscript while I was a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. I thank Professor Christian Joppke for arranging my stay at the Institute. IX

x

Acknowledgments

In Philadelphia, my colleagues Paul Allison, Antonio McDaniel, Samuel Preston, and Herbert L. Smith patiently gave advice on the graphs in Chapter 5. Paul Allison was particularly generous with his time. My graduate student Deborah Mcilvaine, in consultation with Professor Allison, produced numerous versions of what I have come to think of as the "ritual waves," and I am thankful to her for her diligence. Herbert L. Smith and Ian Lustick read drafts of Chapter 3, and Paul Lichterman read a draft of Chapter 6. Their comments helped in the revisions process. Another graduate student, Mori Insingher, aided me in assembling the photographs as well as serving as my library assistant in the summers of I 994 and I 99 5. During the years that I was researching and writing, an army of undergraduates fetched and carried books from libraries in Cambridge and Philadelphia; among this group, Yulia Miteva deserves special mention. The secretarial staff of the Sociology Department at Penn helped to produce several copies of the manuscript. Tina Nemetz arranged for endless photocopying and Federal Express mailings. During the writing process, I had the good fortune to present parts of the book as "work in progress" at several university seminars where I benefited enormously from the discussion and criticism of colleagues and graduate students. Among these were David Kertzer's graduate seminar on ritual in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University (spring I993) and Gene Burns's graduate seminar on culture in the Department of Sociology at Princeton (spring I994). Samuel Cohn invited me to speak to the Italian Study Group at the Harvard Center for European Studies in the spring of I992. A highlight of my pilgrimages with the evolving manuscript in hand was the "ritual" presentation that David Laitin has established for Wilder House authors at the University of Chicago. My visit to Wilder House at an early stage in my writing challenged me. In addition to Laitin, I particularly wish to thank George Steinmetz and William Sewell, Jr., as well as the assembled graduate students for their contributions to that event. After I completed the first version of the manuscript, Marta Petrusewicz invited me in the autumn of I994 to the Columbia University Seminar in Modern Italian Studies. That session was invaluable for clarifYing and refining the Italian dimension of the argument. In February I99 5, I presented Chapter 5 at Wendy Griswold's Culture and Society Workshop, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, where her lively and talented graduate students pushed me to clarity and refine arguments. While I was writing the book, I also taught a yearly graduate seminar on sociological approaches to the study of culture. The University of Pennsylvania graduate students who took that course were a source of continual intellectual stimulation as I thought through the design of the book. I thank all the students who enrolled in Sociology 56I between I992 and I995·

Acknowledgments

x1

The ever permeable boundary between the public and private is one of the book's central themes. During the writing of it, I myself lived through an unusual series of public and private events. I could not have written this book, or any book for that matter, if I had not enjoyed the friendship and support of a remarkable group of people who cheerfully crossed the public/ private divide on my behalf. During the spring of 1993, friends in Cambridge, Abigail Collins, Samuel Cohn, Nerys Patterson, George Ross, Joseph Soares, Mary Vogel, Genevieve Warner, and Mary Waters, provided fellowship, humor, and emergency housing. Jeanette Valentine and Alonzo Plough continually opened their home to me-although their children, Julian and Lewis, probably wondered why I always seemed to visit with my computer! Back in Philadelphia in the fall of 1993, a trio of colleagues were unfailingly supportive. Diana Crane repeatedly asked when the book would be done; Linda Aiken was a source of general enthusiasm and a vast number of dinners; and Magali Sarfatti Larsen amused me with social narratives, constant exhortations to "take a walk" or "see a movie," and even memories of fascist Italy. Most important, Magali read and copyedited the entire first draft of the manuscript. Not only did I benefit from her sociological acumen, but she also saved me from numerous errors of Italian grammar and spelling. In the spring of 199 5, Lynn Hunt and Michele Lamont were especially generous with their time and advice. During the entire period, Lucia Benaquisto, Alice Holmes Cooper, Robert Fishman, and Ted Perlmutter were sustaining forces. Despite the ups and downs of their own public and private lives, all four were always "there," and I am deeply appreciative of their friendship. But books, no matter what instrumental purposes they may serve, are ultimately intellectual products, and my most deeply felt debts are intellectual in the broadest sense of the word. In contrast to many first books, this work did not originate in my dissertation-a more restricted study of art and politics in fascist Italy. Yet I could not have conceived of this project ifi had not studied as a graduate student at Harvard with Daniel Bell, Orlando Patterson, Alessandro Pizzorno, and Theda Skocpol; this book is a measure of the enduring influence that all four have had on my work and my sociological imagination. Theda Skocpol especially has been exceedingly kind and generous, as well as unfailingly responsive and supportive, in the years that I have known her. Her indirect contributions to the completion of this manuscript were enormous. David Laitin's infectious enthusiasm when the book was only an idea and his belief that I would actually write it, when I myself had doubts, kept me going in what he did not know were difficult times. I am deeply appreciative of the commitment that he displayed to me and my project. Michael Buraway devoted a part of his 1994 Christmas holiday to the manuscript and

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Acknowledgments

provided many suggestions. His kindness and unflinching moral support sustained me during the last stages of writing, and for this contribution I have no words. My mother died as I began to write the book, and my father died shortly after it went to press. The process of writing kept me from spending time with them during what I had never imagined would be the final years of their lives. It seems a small recompense to dedicate the book to their memory. While I do not favor essentialist arguments in my work, I think that it is only fair to say that this book would never have been written without them.

M.B. Florence, Italy July, Igg6

Chronology

March I?, I86I August I-2, I9I4 November I9I4 May 24, I9I5 October-December I9I7 June I5-2I, I9I8 October-November 4, I9I8 November II, I9I8 November I6, I9I9

May I5, I92I November ?-II, I92I October 27-29, I922 April 6, I924 June IO, I924 January 3, I925

March 30, I926 July 2, I926 April 22, I927 Xlll

Kingdom of Italy proclaimed World War I begins and Italy declares neutrality Mussolini founds Il Popolo d)Italia Italy enters the war on the side of the Triple Entente Battle of Caporetto Battle of the Piave Battle of Vittorio Veneto, "The Vittoria" Armistice signed Parliamentary elections; Mussolini and fascists defeated; socialists and popolari win major victories Mussolini and 3 5 fascists elected to parliament National Fascist Party formed with Michele Bianchi its first secretary March on Rome Parliamentary elections under the Acerbo law: fascist list wins 3 7 4 seats Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti murdered; Anti-fascist opposition develops Mussolini's speech to parliament: the dictatorship proclaimed; "Second Wave" of fascist violence begins Augusto Turati becomes National Fascist Party secretary Ministry of Corporations created; several attempts on Mussolini's life The Labor Charter issued

xtv

Chronology

February II, I929 March 24, I929 I930-I935 October I930 December 7, I93I June 14, I934 October 3, I935

July I?, I936 October 24, I936 September 29, I938 April 6, I939 June Io, I940 July 24-25, I943 July 28, I943 April 28, I945

Lateran Pact with the Catholic Church signed The plebiscite The international economic depression strikes Italy Conflict begins over Catholic Action Achille Starace becomes National Fascist Party secretary Mussolini and Hitler meet in Venice Italy invades Ethiopia, and the League of Nations begins procedures to apply economic sanctions Mussolini proclaims victory in Ethiopia and the Italian Empire Civil war begins in Spain October Protocols signed in Berlin: the RomeBerlin Axis formed Munich Conference Italy occupies Albania Italy enters World War II on Germany's side Fascist Grand Council repudiates Mussolini's leadership; Mussolini resigns Fascist Party dissolved Mussolini executed by partisans

Abbreviations

PCM PNF SPDCR

Archivio Centrale dello Stato Archivio di Stato di Verona Direttorio Serie Gabinetto della Prefettura Ministero della Cultura Popolare Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista Opera Omnia di Benito Mussolini Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) Segretaria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Riservato

b. f. sf.

busta fascicolo sottofascicolo

ACS ASV DS

GP MCP MRF

00

XV

Making the Fascist Self

INTRODUCTION

Post-Fascism/Fascism: Italy 1994/1922

Two Rallies and a Mass On March 28, 1994, a coalition of right-wing parties swept the Italian elections. A month later, neo-fascists (or "post-fascists," as they prefer to label themselves) held positions in the Italian government for the first time since 1943 when Benito Mussolini's fascist regime crumbled. On April 2 5, 1994, the forty-ninth anniversary of the Allied liberation of Italy, "Liberation Day" as the state holiday is known, post-fascists and reconstructed communists appropriated public space to debate the meaning of fascismold and new. The public piazza once more became the arena of cultural contestation over the meaning of fascism. The public piazza, the center of every major Italian city and town, resonates deeply with Italian society, culture, and politics. In the pre-fascist period, the piazza had been the site of bloody clashes between socialists and fascists; during the fascist period, it was the site of parades, rallies, and public political rituals. The defeat of fascism did not signal the end of the piazza's cultural and political significance. From labor strikes and student protests to the terrorist bombings of the Piazza Fontana in Milan in 1974, the piazza was, and is, a vital component of the Italian public sphere and civic life. 1 On April 2 5, three hundred thousand persons led by a coalition of parties that had lost the March elections marched to Piazza del Duomo in Milan. 1 For the cultural and social significance of the Italian piazza, which dates to the Renaissance, see Peter Burke, "The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy," in The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I987), 3I4· For a discussion of the piazza during the modern period, see Mario Isnenghi, VItalia in piazza: I luoghi della vita pubblica dal r848 aigiorni nostri (Milan: Mondadori, I994).

I

2

Making the Fascist Self

They labeled the demonstration a nonpartisan effort to dramatize commitment to "pride in democracy," and their marching slogan was "Don't you dare [Non ci provate]." 2 In Rome, Gianfranco Fini, leader of the reconstructed post-fascist party, attended a mass in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli to celebrate a "feast of reconciliation" and "national pacification." Standing on the steps of the church, Fini proclaimed, "We think of the future-enough of the fences and hatreds of the past! m If the piazza is the secular space of Italian political life, the church is the sacred space of Italian civic and cultural life. Fini exploited this widely perceived distinction to contrast an image of post-fascists at prayer with an image of post-communists and others marching against the results of a legally constituted election. Less than a month later, in Piazza San Lorenzo in Vicenza, Italian youth belonging to the "Skin-head Front of the Veneto" demonstrated to celebrate the return of fascism. Declaring themselves "heirs of the fascists of Salo," the Nazi puppet regime set up in northern Italy after Mussolini's regime crumbled, they dressed in black, gave the fascist salute, and called for a resurgence of fascism in its most extreme and brutal form. Chanting "Honor, Fidelity, and Courage" and shouting "We are hard, no one will stop us," they proclaimed that "fifty years of democracy and pluralism had changed social structure for the worse. " 4 A La Stampa journalist described the scene in the piazza as an inevitable outcome of the March election: "I -saw Italian naziskins march. They were some months early, but we knew that sooner or later they would return: they advanced decisive, brutal in dress and face, lined up like a military company, with flags raised high, garish, unmistakable: even those who see them for the first time understand what they symbolize, who invented it, what they recall. " 5 The piazza, the church, the piazza-the sites of these three public ritual events were temporally proximate but politically distant. The piazza and the church represent two poles of a calculated political battle over the memory and meaning of the old fascism. The Vicenza rally was a spontaneous outpouring of disaffected youth from which the Italian post-fascist leader had been trying to disassociate himself. The Vicenza rally and the images it produced-Italian skinheads in black shirts-were consonant with popular understandings that have equated fascism principally with violence. Even a scholar as distinguished as Zeev Sternhell, in a recent reinterpretation of 2 Mino Fuccillo, "La storia siamo noi," La Repubblica (Rome), 26 April I994, 3· Unless a translator is named, all translations from the Italian are my own. ' Quoted in Paolo Boccacci, "Fini, una messa per dimenticare," La Repubblica, 26 April I994, 5 · 4 Quoted in Gabriele Romagnoli, "Reportage nel covo degli skin," La Stampa (Turin), I9 May I994, 7· 5 Ferdinanda Camon, "Perche proprio oggi," La Stampa, I6 May I994, I.

Post-Fascism/Fascism

3

European fascism, concludes: "Fascism, therefore, was not content to criticize the existing state of affairs; it also sought to provide the nucleus of a comprehensive, heroic, and violent political culture. " 6 The neo-nazis of Vicenza and the "post-fascists" of the Basilica Santa Maria degli Angeli together evoke conflicting emotions of artificial comfort and false alarm. The artificial comfort derives from the relative ease with which politicians, "post-fascist" and other, can reject the implicit illegality of skinhead political practice. The low probability that skinheads will ever assume control of the Italian state-or any state, for that matter-means that the alarm they generate is false. Violence is not the defining feature of fas.cism, old or new. Contested and partial understandings of the European fascism of the 1920s and 1930s drive the current Italian conflict over meaning and memory. Historians and social scientists confronted with the diversity of national variations of "old" fascist practice declared the attempt to find a common thread futile. Rather than elevating fascism to the status of a new political ideology, they viewed it as a historical aberration (to invoke Benedetto Croce, "a parenthesis") best understood by careful analysis of its various national manifestations? At its most benign, fascism was a political exercise in "developmental dictatorship"; at its worst, it was a temporary exercise in irrational violence." New political developments in continental Europe that include the emergence of Italian "post-fascism" as an electoral power force a revision of fascism as a political idea. Fascists or "post-fascists" (the name is irrelevant) have an understanding of their political projects even if social analysts do not. The locations chosen for the events of April 25, 1994, the church versus the piazza, are suggestive of the meaning of the new and old fascist projects. The piazza and the church have a formal similarity that is constitutive of much of the analysis that follows. In both, one loses one's private self in the public community. But when one leaves the piazza, one becomes a private citizen again, whereas when one leaves the church, the community leaves with one-that is, the space between public and private self evaporates. In rallies in liberal democracies such as contemporary Italy, citizens have multiple identities or selves that they espouse at different moments. In contrast to their relationship to the church, where public and private selves merge, citi6 Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 252. 7 For Croce's assertion, see Renzo De Felice, Interpretations of Fascism, trans. Brenda Huff Everett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 14. ' A. James Gregor, Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979 ).

4

Making the Fascist Self

zens reassume their private identities when they leave the piazza. The piazza reinforces the boundary between the public self of political engagement and the private self of ordinary life. 9 The Italian Fascist Project The Italy of 1922, the year Benito Mussolini's fascist movement assumed control of the state, appears at first glance worlds apart from the Italy of 1994. Pluralist democracy, free markets, and universalism-political inventions of the Enlightenment-seem finally to have triumphed in the world. But instead, the opposite has occurred. In Italy, the wave of political scandals referred to as tangentopoli toppled postwar political arrangements and gave way to the electoral success of post-fascism and the proliferation of right-wing violence embodied in the rise of neo-nazi and skinhead cadres. In 1922, the First World War had finally destroyed Europe's old regimes. In Italy and Europe, statesmen and citizens, ordinary men and women, perceived themselves as "Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / the other powerless to be born.»~o The unborn world of 1922 included increasing worker militancy, economic recession, and widespread fears of socialist revolution, all of which seemed to threaten an already precarious social stability. Roberto Vivarelli suggests that the fascist impulse which overtook Italy and Europe in the early twentieth century, and which in reconstituted form threatens contemporary Europe, "speaks Italian. 'm Vivarelli's broader point that Italy in 1922 is useful as an entry to understanding Europe's present as well as its past is congruent with themes I advance in this book. The similarities, and not the differences, between 1922 and 1994 lend wider cogency to my analysis. Popular fascist idiom described Benito Mussolini's takeover of the Italian state as a "revolution." The fascist revolution did not topple the Italian state, however, and it did not change underlying class relations in Italian society. 12 What sort of revolution did Mussolini and his supporters have in mind? The Italian fascist regime that governed Italy from 1922 to 1943 aimed to create new men and women, a new ethos, a new culture. In con9 Cf. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989 ). 10 The lines are from Matthew Arnold, "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse." II Roberto Vivarelli, "Interpretations of the Origins of Fascism," Journal of Modern History 63 (March 1991), 30. 12 I follow Theda Skocpol's definition of social revolution. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 4-5.

Post-Fascism/Fascism

5

temporary parlance, the regime sought to forge new identities. Although it is highly unlikely that either regime intellectuals or ordinary Italians conceived of their selves in the language of identity, the term serves as a convenient way to encapsulate the fascist revolutionary projectY Fascism in general, and Italian fascism in particular, was a political project that aimed to recreate the self, to create new identities as citizens of fascist Italy. The "fascist project" was the set of actions and programs the regime undertook to accomplish its desired cultural ends. The regime "fascistifized" Italy's principal cultural and social institutions. It reorganized schools, took over popular and elite artistic institutions from cinema to theater to publishing, controlled the press, and created a web of voluntary organizations that mobilized men and women of all ages. It made peace with the Catholic Church in the Concordat of 1929 and instituted demographic policies that redefined the nature of the Italian family. 14 Public spectacle was the favored expressive vehicle of the fascist identity project. Public political spectacles or rituals (I use the words interchangeably), such as the events of April 25, 1994, are not simply arenas for the exegesis of political symbols but venues for addressing broader theoretical issues concerning the nature of nondemocratic politics. Political ritualsrallies, parades, commemoration ceremonies, holidays-are cultural prisms that I analyze to advance an argument about how politics, culture, and identity intersect. By taking the fascist project on its own terms, I seek to understand a remarkably persistent modern political force. This book plows two distinct yet interconnected fields. The first involves demarcating the boundaries of fascism itself; the second concerns how public political rituals served as vehicles of the fascist political idea. This double focus reflects the tension between two senses of culture that underlie my analysis. The first sense concerns culture in the broad ethnographic understanding of the term, what Clifford Geertz has captured with his method of "thick 13 "Identity" is historically specific, but this in no way obviates its use if we are cautious. On the transcultural use of the term, see Richard Handler, "Is 'Identity' a Useful Crosscultural Concept?" in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 27-40. On the analytic use of historically specific terms, see Craig Calhoun, "'New Social Movements' of the Early Nineteenth Century," Social Science History 17 (Fall 1993), 385-427. 14 The best general introductions remain Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso (Bari: Laterza, 1975); Edward R. Tannenbaum, The Fascist Experience (New York: Basic, 1972); and Victoria De Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For a recent capsule summary of regime demographic policies, somewhat overburdened by its theoretical apparatus, see David G. Horn, Social Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

6

Making the Fascist Self

description" and his definition of culture as "webs of significance that [man] himself has spunY This sense of culture reveals what is "Italian" in fascist culture, and the mapping of historical context re-creates it. The second sense of culture is captured in the detailed analysis of objects and practicesin this case fascist political ritual. William Sewell's distinction between a schema and a resource elegantly summarizes the dualities embedded in this second sense. According to Sewell, a schema is a society's "fundamental tools of thought," consisting of "conventions, recipes, scenarios, principles of action, and habits of speech and gesture. " 16 Resources are the capacities human agents have to recraft social structure, or culture writ large, depending on their manipulation of the available schema. Neither schemata nor resources are independent of each other. They mutually reinforce each other and limit and enhance the capacity for action as well as for cultural and political transformation. In trying to create a fascist identity or new conception of the self, the regime continually relied on the available schema and was ultimately a prisoner of it: what was "Italian" about Italian culture and identity limited and constrained what was fascist about fascist identity. Just as the regime was constrained by the exigencies of the particular, so too my path in this book constantly glides among the abstraction of theoretical generality, the schema of fascism, and the empirical specificity of Italian fascist pqblic events. Orienting Questions Three questions structure my analysis of public political ritual. First, I ask a broad theoretical question about the nature of fascism that abandons old and dead-end categories and reconceptualizes fascism in terms of citizenship, state, nation, and the construction of the self. In this task, I pay close attention to fascist narratives that reject liberalism as political ideology and democracy as a form of government. I argue that Italian fascism rejected the split between the public and private self, the cultural core of liberal democracy. Political movements and parties which reject this split on cultural grounds are more likely to gain political ascendance during those historical moments when diverse social groups perceive the cultural bifurcation of a public and private self as untenable. I suggest that movements and parties that reaffirm the self as a totality might be fruitfully redefined as fascist. 15 Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973 ), 5. 16 William H. Sewell, Jr., "A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation," American Journal of Sociology 98 (July 1992), 8, 10-13.

Post-Fascism/Fascism

7

Second, I ask whether states, even reputedly totalitarian states, can impose meaning or identities on their citizens. This analytic question addresses current debates about the role of symbols, images, and language in political practice and challenges the assumption that representations of power equal realities of power. Internal colonization is the governing metaphor of the political process that underlay the Italian fascist cultural project. 17 Just as colonial administrators encountered resistance from indigenous cultural practices, fascist cultural bureaucrats encountered resistance from prior Italian cultural forms with strong institutional buttresses. "Ritual" is the analytic term that most appropriately captures the numerous public spectacles which occupied public space in fascist Italy. In contrast to the usual scholarly practice of analyzing ritual as text, my analysis focuses on the formal properties of ritual action as constitutive of meaning. In so doing, I conceptualize rituals as emotive practices or actions whose meaning lies in the repetition of patterns. A third, historical, question merges my theoretical and analytic propositions. I ask how Italian fascism attempted to reconstitute the nature of political identity through redefinitions of community and self. Using empirically grounded case studies, I demonstrate that the Italian fascist regime attempted to create a fascist political community and identity by merging the public and private self in rituals-communities of feeling-in the public piazzas. The new fascist political community, dramatized in the public piazzas of Italy, created fascist citizens-men and women whose identities were bound to the regime-to the extent that these new identities articulated with earlier identities buttressed by preexisting social institutions, most salient among them the popular cultural practice of Catholicism and the sacredness of the family embodied in the figure of the mother. The Italian fascist regime, in competition with the church and the family, wanted its citizenry to find its total self, public and private, in the piazza. Ideal fascist citizens would carry the piazza with them wherever they went. The piazza was the community, the temporary community of fascist feeling, that would define the fascist self or identity in much the same way the Roman Catholic Church defined the Italian religious self. I argue that in the polyvalence of the piazza and the univalence of the church, we can approach a new understanding of the "old" fascism that has contemporary social and political salience. 17 The literature on colonization, though it tends to focus empirically on former territorial colonies of European empires, has become an area where issues of culture and power are analyzed. See, for example, Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), and Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

8

Making the Fascist Self

Mapping the Terrain Ahead This book attempts to re-create the social experience of fascist ritual by analyzing the patterns of ritual events. What meaning lay in the fascist identity creation project, lay in the disruption and appropriation of familiar patterns. Patterns of ritual events across time and space serve as my principal methodological frame. Because I focus on the reconstruction of experience, I do not emphasize the textual exegesis of fascist symbols such as the wearing of the black shirt, or the passo Romano, or the fasces or the eagle. These symbols were part of particular ritual actions, and I discuss them only when they affect the context in which they occurred. The empirical analysis begins in 1923 with the first anniversary of the "March on Rome," the symbolic event that brought Italian fascism to power, and ends in the fall of 1938 as Italy was mobilizing for war. Background material presented in various chapters incorporates the pre-1923 period; Italian soldiers' letters written in 1941 from the battlefield subsumes the war period. The book bypasses the fall of the regime, the Salo Republic, and the Resistance, though popular memory in Europe and the United States tends to equate these events with fascist Italy. The war period is absent but war is not. Many of the public ritual events I describe were prolegomena for military action, and war is a subtext of the analysis. Commenting on the rationale behind case selection in comparative history, historian Charles Maier has noted, "Flower arranging is not botany." 18 Maier's felicitous metaphor applies equally well to case selection and research design in studies that wed political to cultural analysis. The architecture of this book depends on three case studies that illustrate my theoretical, analytic, and empirical claims. These cases cohere internally, though they do not represent steps in a linear argument. Their juxtapositions are logical; their style is narrative. They produce a cumulative effect, underscoring my central empirical point that the meaning of fascist ritual lay in its practice and my central theoretical point that fascism as ideology sought to merge the public and private self in the community of the state. Each case uses different methods, from literary to quantitative, to interpret fascism and explain ritual action. The case studies are, first, an analysis of how the regime redesigned the annual commemoration of the March on Rome over the period between 1923 and 1938; second, an analysis of daily ritual life in Verona spanning twenty years; and third, an exploration of what Italian fascism meant to its most dedicated adherents-a group of fascist "heroes," soldiers who died 18 Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 5·

Post-Fascism/Fascism

9

fighting for Italy on the Greek Albanian front. The third case relies on textual exegesis of dead soldiers' letters. These "voices from the grave" allow me to extend previous studies of politics and culture and to discuss the extent to which fascist identities formed. Internal and external comparisons structure each case. The story of the March on Rome examines its commemoration at key temporal intervals to map change and continuity. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on how the annual staging of the March appropriated public space in the name of the regime. Radiating outward from the Roman center, the annual holiday commemoration filled the cities and towns of Italy. Pilgrimage is the leitmotif that united the bodies of mothers, soldiers, fascist leaders, dead heroes, and Mussolini himself as they boarded the trains that carried them to ceremonies dotting the Italian landscape. The appropriation of time structures Chapter 5, the story of ritual life in Verona. Based on a Fascist Party calendar that recorded all fascist events in the city ofVerona for a twenty-year period, the chapter describes how fascism re-created civic life and to what extent it met with resistance from preexisting cultural forms, particularly the strong Veronese Catholic culture that looked dubiously at fascism and socialism. I map change in ritual genres and in local/national ritual interaction over time to examine the issue of ideological production in the Italian periphery. Chapter 6 addresses the question of how committed fascists articulated, reinterpreted, and lived their identities. I contrast public narratives of fascist heroism with personal narratives of fascist heroes by juxtaposing obituaries as popular cultural texts with soldiers' letters from the battlefield. The three cases lie on a continuum. Space and time unite the March and Verona cases; the internalization of fascism assesses the effects of the appropriation of space and time. Because each story exists in real time, I explore the effect of exogenous regime events such as fascist colonial aggression and internal state economic and social policies on ritual outcomes. Note on Sources The empirical and analytic arguments presented in this book are based on systematic reading of primary historical materials. Sources vary widely; they include newspaper accounts, state documents, police records, propaganda narratives, and plays and novels. What unites them is that they are all "fascist" in origin. This is a strength and a limitation. With the exception of data taken from police files, there are no counternarratives or alternative constructions of events. Thus, the data force us to take the fascist project on its own terms.

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Making the Fascist Self

It is possible, however, to construct counternarratives from these fascist sources. For example, I take newspaper accounts as neither true nor false representations of political events but simply as narratives that convey the emotions the regime hoped to engender in its participants. Thus, they are real representations of hoped-for emotions but not necessarily pictures of emotional attachment to the regime. They convey intention but not reception. The journalists who wrote these accounts were trapped by an Italian language of sentimentality that is not particularly fascist but that the fascist regime mobilized to its advantage. Similarly, the analysis of public events in Verona tells us much in terms of sheer magnitude but little directly about Veronese reception of these events. At the same time, the sheer fact that they occurred tells us something about the fascist project. The letters from the front provide the best available evidence of an authentic voice of the fascist self articulated in the language of the quasi-educated petite bourgeoisie-the lower middle class-whose cultural and social aspirations drew its members to the regime. Those voices teach us much about the political and social appeal of fascism that kept it in power for twenty years and also explain the transience of that appeal as the war came.

CHAPTER

I

Interpreting Fascism/ Explaining Ritual

Fascism as Political Idea

Defining the Undefinable Parsimony eludes past and current exegeses of fascism. Attempts to theorize fascism have mined specific historical instances for generalities and yielded catalogs of characteristics. 1 Even a cursory reading of this scholarship suggests that it is impossible to generalize across cases and leaves the impression that Benedetto Croce was correct when he described fascism as a "parenthesis" in European history. Yet an analysis of the process of Italian fascist identity creation demands a conceptualization of fascism, no matter how provisional, as political idea. Existing studies of fascism fall into two schools. The first tries to answer the "what," or definitional question. Frequently, this is articulated in a discussion of whether or not fascism is a "generic" concept or a national variation of historically specific political instances. Of those who try to define fascism, the central theme is the impossibility of definition. For example, fascism is the "vaguest of political terms"; and "a general theory of fascism must be no more than a hypothesis which fits most of the facts. m The sec-

1 The literature on fascism written roughly between 1945 and 1976 is as voluminous as it is inconclusive. My discussion is highly selective and makes no claim to completeness. Fascism: A Reader's Guide, ed. Walter Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), Renzo De Felice, Interpretations of Fascism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), and Stanley G. Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), provide useful introductions to that literature. 2 Payne, Fascism, 4-5; George L. Mosse, "Towards a General Theory of Fascism," in International Fascism, ed. George L. Mosse (London: Sage, 1979 ), I.

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Making the Fascist Self

ond approach bypasses definition and tries to establish the characteristics of regimes and constituencies. 3 Seymour Martin Lipset's classic account of the class composition of fascist movements attributes fascism's success to the political disaffection of the middle classes. Juan Linz's approach to constituency formation starts from the premise that an independent "phenomenon" of fascism existed, defined as a "hyper-nationalist, often pan-nationalist, anti-parliamentary, anti-liberal, anti-communist, populist and therefore anti-proletarian, partly anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois, anti-clerical, or at least, non-clerical movement, with the aim of national social integration through a single party and corporative representation not always equally emphasized: with a distinctive style and rhetoric, it relied on activist cadres ready for violent action combined with electoral participation to gain power with totalitarian goals by a combination of legal and violent tactics. " 4 Linz's definition rests on his assumption that fascism occupies a residual political field. As a late-comer to the political scene, fascism had to capture whatever "political space," in the form of ideological doctrine and political constituencies, was available to it. His argument is dependent on an analysis of the social bases of fascism's political competitors. 5 Linz recognizes the importance of national case studies, and the characteristics he outlines are applicable in various combinations to a broad range of fascist movements and regimes. In general, studies of institutions and constituencies display greater analytic precision than those that wrestle with definition. Historian Gilbert Allardyce's frequently cited, and somewhat strident, analysis, published in 1979, appeared to have closed the question of "generic" fascism. Allardyce asserts that fascism had no meaning outside Italy and that it was neither an ideology nor a mental category. Comparing fascism to romanticism (and curiously obtuse about fascism's other ideological kin-modernism), he states that both terms "mean virtually nothing." Resigned to the fact that "fascism [as a political term] is probably with us for good," Allardyce maintains that the proper analytic task is to "limit the 3 Again, the literature is vast. Alberto Aquarone's study of the Italian fascist regime, L'organizzazione dello Stato totalitario (rpt., Turin: Einaudi, 1974), and Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship, trans. Jean Steinberg (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), serve as examples of the first category; in the second, see Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (rpt., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 87-179, and Gino Germani, "Fascism and Class," in The Nature of Fascism, ed. Stuart J. Woolf (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), 65-95. 4 Juan J. Linz, "Some Notes toward a Comparative Study of Fascism in Sociological Historical Perspective," in Fascism: A Reader's Guide, ed. Laqueur, 12-13. 5 Juan J. Linz, "Political Space and Fascism as a Latecomer," in Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism, ed. Stein Ugelvik Larsen (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget,

1980), 153-89.

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damage"; he concludes: "Placing it [fascism] within historical boundaries at least provides a measure of control, restricting the proliferation of the word in all directions, past and present, and preventing it from distorting political rhetoric in our own time. Fascism must become a foreign word again, untranslatable outside a limited period in history. " 6 Fascism refuses to go away. Its death knell has not sounded either in the real world of political practice or in the relatively cloistered world of academic discourse. Recent scholarship signals a resurgence of interest in fascism and conservative ideology? Much of it appears similar to its predecessors. For example, Roger Griffin argues that the tenn "fascism" has undergone an "unacceptable loss of precision." He proposes a new "ideal type" of fascism based on the following definition: "Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism." 8 A revival of the "social interpretations" of fascism, particularly nazism, has also occurred. 9 Heirs of Lipset's mode of analysis, these studies are less deterministic and grounded in a more nuanced notion of class and political action. A central weakness in much of the writing on fascism, past and present, has been a failure to draw a sharp distinction between fascist movements and regime action, between fascism as ideology and fascism as state, between political impulse and political institution. In general, analysts elide the question of culture and ideology or simply deal with it in a descriptive manner. The forces that enable a political movement to assume state power are different from, but not unconnected to, the forces that define a new regime. During the r920s and I930s, virtually every country in Europe had a fascist movement, or a political movement that displayed the characteristics of the fascist impulse, but relatively few of them progressed to political regimes, that is, took control of the state. 10 Culture and ideology figure differently at both stages. In the movement phase, they act as powerful mobilizing devices that frame the political beliefs of committed cadres of supporters.n In the 6 Gilbert Allardyce, "What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept," American Historical Review 84 (1979), 388. 7 See, for example, Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), and Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991). ' Griffin, Nature of Fascism, 26. 9 See Peter Baldwin, "Social Interpretations of Nazism: Renewing a Tradition," Journal of Contemporary History 25 (1990), 5-37; Gregory M. Luebbert, Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and the collection of essays in Splintered Classes, ed. Rudy Koshar (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990). 1° For a summary of these movements, see Peter H. Merkl, "Comparing Fascist Movements," in Who Were the Fascists, ed. Larsen, 752-83. 11 Recent developments in social movement theory that take the role of culture into account are useful for analyzing fascist movements. For a summary, see Sidney Tarrow, "Men-

14

Making the Fascist Self

regime phase, they serve as conversion mechanisms to ensure the consent of a broad public constituency. This book focuses on the latter while not denying the importance of the former. Totalitarian states are not necessary outcomes, and as my analysis suggests, they are as much fascist fictions as political realities. Mussolini declared that his regime was the first totalitarian state; and although recent historiography has shown that the fascist cultural project was highly fissured, the intention of, if not the reality of, coherence was a goal. 12 Hannah Arendt built terror into the definition of totalitarianism. 13 Her quasi-psychoanalytic approach to fascism, which paints a portrait of mass societies, mobs, and atomized individuals responding to the congeries of a police state, evokes the neo-nazis ofVicenza and the images of an Orwellian 1984. Terror and violence as analytic frames may capture the political realities of Stalinist Russia and Holocaust horrors, but terror did not represent the quotidian experience ofltalian fascism and distracts from historical and theoretical understanding. . In contrast to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, the Italian fascist regime was relatively nonrepressive. Prominent socialist intellectuals did not fare well. Between 1922 and 1943, the regime banned politically dissenting groups and subjected the Italian population to an elaborate apparatus of social and cultural control administered by a state bureaucracy. Yet comparative reading of the historical evidence suggests that the social, economic, and even cultural practices of fascist Italy were not terribly different from those of other state bureaucracies during the 1920s and 1930s. 14 Any pretext at democratic government was abandoned after the plebiscite of 1929. The regime instituted its racial laws in 1938 as a result of its alliance with Nazi Germany. Nonetheless, Italy for much of this period was a refuge for Jews fleeing nazism from other European countries. When the war started and the regime fell, the puppet government at Salo became extalities, Political Cultures, and Collective Action Frames," in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 174-202, and Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), n8-34. 11 For accounts of the malleability of the regime's policies, see Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, I922-I945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Mabel Berezin, "The Organization of Political Ideology: Culture, State, and Theater in Fascist Italy," American Sociological Review 56 (1991), 639-sr; Gabriele Turi, Casa Einaudi (Bologna: II Mulino, 1990); and Alexander De Grand, "Cracks in the Facade: The Failure of Fascist Totalitarianism in Italy, I93 s-39," European History Quarterly 2I ( I99I ), 5I s-3 5. 13 Hannah Arendt, Tbe Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973) esp. 460-79. 14 See Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989 ).

Interpreting Fascism/Explaining Ritual

I

5

tremely repressive. But the period of the Nazi occupation of Italy is a separate story from the one offered here. 15 Scholars have argued that it should be possible to establish a "fascist minimum," by which they mean a set of criteria without which fascism could not exist. 16 Yet they have been reluctant to ascribe greater or lesser degrees of importance to the variables they view as characteristic of fascism. I believe a fuller understanding of the "old" fascism emerges when we analyze the cultural features of democracy that it rejected. Italian fascism was anti-socialist and anticlerical, despite its conciliation with the Catholic Church, but above all it was anti-liberal as liberalism was understood in early-twentieth-century Italy. The rejection of liberalism in Italy was deeper than a rejection of the failures of the Giolitti regime. 17 A revision of previous discussions of fascism, and Italian fascism as a historical case, in light of the rejection of liberalism, suggests new and less restricting ways to think about fascism, by whatever name one chooses to call it. The Rejection of Liberalism Discussions of Marxism have confounded discussions of fascism. Simply positing that fascism is not Marxism, or is a form of "anti-Marxism," fails to address salient features of both ideologies. 18 Many fascists, including Mussohni himself, began their political careers as socialists. Few fascists (I cannot identifY one) began their careers as liberals, and few liberals converted to fascism. What were the differences and points of confluence between fascism and Marxism which made the transition from one to the other possible? 15 Interpretations of this period are highly contested among Italian historians. For a recent account, see Claudio Pavone, Una Guerra civile (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991 ). " Payne, Fascism, 196, citing De Felice, Interpretations of Fascism. 17 Roberto Vivarelli, It Fallimento del Liberalismo: Studi sulle origini del Fascismo (Bologna: II Mulino, 1981), attributes the rise of Italian fascism to the failure of liberalism. In this respect his argument is congruent with mine; he locates his analysis in the economic dimensions of Italian society, however, whereas I focus on the cultural climate. According to Vivarelli, Italy in 1922 was an agrarian society with a quasi-literate populace that did not generate the economic resources and social capital conducive to liberal government (see 3336). 18 Ernst Nolte's controversial interpretation of fascism as a "meta-political phenomenon" that manifests a "resistance to transcendence" begins as a form of "Anti-Marxism." "Transcendence" has a theoretical and practical dimension that, despite the highly abstract philosophical language, suggests an affirmation of the cultural dimensions ofliberalism. "Theoretical transcendence" implies a capacity to imagine a world outside the local or the particular, a world outside the self; "practical transcendence" represents an ability to engage in multiple social relations or intersect with diverse networks. Transcendence is an overly abstract way of talking of universalism and impartiality, the core of liberal values and the hallmark of the democratic state (Three Faces of Fascism, trans. Leila Vannewitz [New York: New American Library, 1969], 537, 542).

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Making the Fascist Self

The beginning of an answer lies in Zeev Sternhell's analysis of fascism as an "independent cultural and political phenomenon" representing a "revision" of Marxism. According to Sternhell, fascism was a political hybrid that rejected, first, the liberal ideals of rationalism, individualism, and utilitarianism, and second, the materialistic dimensions of Marxism. From Marxism, fascism borrowed a concept of communitarianism embodied in a new form of revolutionary syndicalism; and from liberalism, it borrowed a commitment to free markets. 19 Sternhell's contention that market economies are compatible with fascist ideology and regimes forecloses purely economic interpretations of fascism. 20 Sternhell's analysis lends support to the importance I ascribe to fascism's disavowal of liberal political culture, but it is too dependent on the writings of national, and sometimes obscure, avant-garde intellectuals to serve as a fulcrum for generating new theories of fascism. Stephen Holmes's critique of nonmarxist communitarianism as a form of "anti-liberalism" is most congruent with the arguments I advance. Marxism is a form of communitarianism whose commitment to science identifies it as an Enlightenment ideology distinct from fascism. "Anti-liberalism" is a third form of modern political ideology which Holmes explicitly, although guardedly, relates to fascism. Anti-liberalism is a "mind-set" that Holmes identifies by what it is against: "individualism, rationalism, humanitarianism, rootlessness, permissiveness, universalism, materialism, skepticism, and cosmopolitanism." Anti-liberals long for the restoration of lost community, which liberalism destroys in the name of Enlightenment claims to science. 21 Liberalism as political ideal was a product of the French Revolution's call for "personal security," "individual liberty," and "democracy." "Equality," the fourth feature of liberalism, was not a fundamental concern of its initial exponents. Holmes distinguishes liberalism as ideal from liberalism as political institution. Individualism and freedom are the liberal cultural ideals that democratic states institutionalize. According to Holmes, anti-liberals equate the failures of the democratic state with the failures of liberalism. 22 Holmes is concerned principally with contemporary anti-liberals, such as Alasdair Macintyre and Roberto Unger, whom he is careful not to label fascists. He traces the roots of anti-liberalism to the eighteenth century and explicitly draws a connection between contemporary theorists and fascist inSternhell, Birth of Fascist Ideology, 4-5, 7. Marxist scholarship has been the principal source of economic interpretations of fascism. For an empirical study of structures of production under fascism and nazism written from a neo-liberal perspective, see Charles S. Maier, "The Economics of Fascism and Nazism," in In Search of Stability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 70-120. 21 Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993 ), 4-6. 22 Holmes is writing a defense of liberalism and takes the position that the failure of the democratic state is not sufficient justification for the rejection of liberalism as a political ideal. 19

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tellectuals such as Giovanni Gentile. 23 Holmes's conception of anti-liberalism has greater theoretical cogency as a framing device than theories of fascism that are wed to early-twentieth-century Europe. His concept is transcultural and transhistorical. First, Holmes identifies anti-liberal communitarian ideology in diverse cultural and historical milieus from eighteenth-century France to the contemporary United States. Second, he posits no necessary connection between the form of state or political movement that follows this ideological persuasion. Among the authors he analyzes, Carl Schmitt became an architect of Nazi legal theory, Alasdair Macintyre has become the cultural icon of groups seeking to revitalize American democracy, and Leo Straus has remained an esoteric figure known principally within the academy. History and culture, as well as opportunity for political engagement, have circumscribed, and circumscribe, the practical influence of these thinkers. Liberalism, as ideal and political organization, institutionalized the central cultural chasm of modernity-the fractionalization of individual and collective identities into public and private selves. 24 Identity is an issue of modernity that is connected to an ideological conception of individualism. Individualism as well as fascism, to invoke my earlier reference to Vivarelli, "speaks Italian." Jacob Burckhardt suggested the modernity of individualism and dated it to the Italian Renaissance: "at the close of the thirteenth century Italy began to swarm with individuality." 25 From our vantage point, in which the Enlightenment division of subject and object is under scrutiny, Burckhart's observation is contestable. Nevertheless, it was a given of two hundred years of intellectual history and is the Archimedean point of eighteenth-century philosophy. Liberalism incorporates a multiplicity of identities-political, social, national, gender; the list is potentially endless and subject to ever greater refinements. Public and private as a broad categorization schema captures all possible identities. As an analytic frame, it has an intellectual history that usually incorporates a discussion of the differences among the state, civil society, and the market. I advocate a slightly less conventional use of this distinction as a convenient shorthand for what we term private or "ordinary" life-family, gender, love, religion, arenas of deeply felt identities that are beyond the purview of the liberal democratic state. 26 Holmes, Anatomy of Antiliberalism, xii-xiii, 9· Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT, 1989) contains the paradigmatic statement of the genesis of the separation between the public and private and its relation to liberal democracy currently prevailing in social science discourse. 25 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, vol. 1 (New York: Harper, 1958), I43· 26 "Public/private" is a term used with more frequency than precision. Much of the current thinking on it derives, as previously mentioned, from Habermas, Structural Transforma23

24

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Making the Fascist Self

Democratic contractualism, which upholds the integrity of individualism and multiple identities, sometimes has a political effect that diverges from its theoretical intent. In his discussion of totalitarianism, Claude Lefort suggests the alienating potential of democracy when he notes, "Number breaks down unity, destroys identity." He locates the weakness of democracy in its desacralization of politics represented in its rejection of a sacred center, which the monarchy symbolizes in pre-liberal forms of government. Democracy leaves an empty symbolic space that totalitarian forms might fill: "Democracy inaugurates the experience of an ungraspable, uncontrollable society in which the people will be said to be sovereign, of course, but whose identity will constantly be open to question, whose identity will remain latent.m7 Lefort's analysis suggests that the split between public and private self is the historical exception rather than the historical norm, a split that became structurally tenable in the caesura known as modernity. It is precisely this aspect of liberal democracy that communitarians reject, and it is the void that fascism attempts to fill when it repudiates the liberal democratic state. 28 Italian fascism's rejection of the liberal bifurcation of identity made it similar to other forms of pre-Enlightenment social and political organization such as aristocracies and tribes. Fascism departed from older organizational forms in its attempt to re-create a public/private version of the self in the political arena, or the fascist community of the state. A. James Gregor argues, "Fascism as an ideology was a far more complex and systematic intellectual product than many of its antagonists (and many of its protagonists as

tion. See for example, Margaret R. Somers, "What's Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public Sphere? Toward an Historical Sociology of Concept Formation," Sociological Theory 13 (1995), II5-43, and the essays in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). But the distinction also has roots in legal and feminist theory. For one early example among many, see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). For an overview of recent uses of the term, see JeffWeintraub, "Varieties and Vicissitudes of Public Space," in Metropolis, ed. Philip Kasinitz (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 280-319, and Jeff Weintraub, "The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction" in Public and Private Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, ed. Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For a discussion that delves into the personal and comes closest to my sense of the distinction, see John Brewer, "This, That and the Other: Public, Social, and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in Shifting the Boundaries-Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Daria Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 199 5 ), 1-21. 27 Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 303-4. 28 On the relative novelty and cultural particularity of democracy, see Giuseppe DiPalma, To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 16-26.

Interpreting Fascism/Explaining Ritual

19

well) have been prepared to admit." 29 According to Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, the Italian philosophy professor who was Mussolini's first minister of education and general cultural adviser, was the intellectual architect of the new "third way." Gentile's collected works fill many volumes, but the salient point of his political analysis was that the fascist citizen found his or her self in the community of the state. 30 Gentile's own words best capture the spirit of this argument: "The State is itself a personality, it has a will, because it knows its aims, it has a consciousness of itself, a certain thought, a certain program, it has a concept which signifies history, tradition, the universal life of the Nation, which the State organizes, guarantees, and realizes. " 31 Gentile's conception of the "ethical" state represents an inverted Hegelianism that links, as it confounds, fascism and Marxism. Historian George Mosse notes, "At the turn of the century, the radical left and the radical right were apt to demand control of the whole man and not just a political piece of him. " 32 A belief in community unites fascism and Marxism; a commitment to an Enlightenment vision of science unites liberalism and Marxism. Fascism rejected the social, cultural, and political dimensions of modernity while accepting its economic and technological features. 33 Antiliberalism offers the most parsimonious theoretical frame in which to analyze the broad cultural issues that fascism as ideology poses. Community, public/private self, identity, and citizenship are commonly invoked to discuss democratic practice but rarely to discuss fascism. I argue that the terminology of liberalism can be fruitfully employed to understand fascism as political ideal. Applying these terms to fascism as ideal and institution opens the black box of endless categorization and provides conceptual tools for making sense of what otherwise appears an inchoate mass of contradictory ideas and actions. The Political Construction of Identity Self and Culture Identity and cultural meanings are intimately connected. Part of the cultural understanding of the self, identity is central to the participation m A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism (New York: Free Press, 1969 ), 26. Ibid., 216. 31 "L'organizzazione scientifica dello stato e l'istituto di finanza," in Giovanni Gentile, Politica e cultura, ed. Herve A. Cavallera, vol. 2 (Florence: Le Lettere, 1991), 86. 32 "Towards a General Theory of Fascism," 4· 33 It is a truism that Italian fascists were attracted to technology. There is no study of Italy similar to Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). For a comparative analysis of futurism, fascism, and technology, see Charles S. Maier, "Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 192os," Journal of Contemporary History 5 (1970), 27-61. 29

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meaningful patterns of social action. We all have identities, no matter how narrowly construed, from the moment the infant realizes that a world apart from itself exists. Self and other, subject and object-the recognition of difference begins from earliest life. The self, embodied in the person, is neither wholly constructed nor wholly essential. Both these notions are under scrutiny today, but for purposes of this analysis I assume the idea of a self.3 4 Psychological theories of identity focus on individuals. Social theories of identity focus on the formal matrix of relations, or networks, in which individuals are enmeshed. Social identities are first steps to political identities and are customarily prior to political identities. In contrast to liberalism, which holds these identities separate, fascism tries to reverse or obliterate the boundaries between the two. Who we are, how we define and conceive of ourselves, how we recognize others who are one of us and who are not are connected to how we construct ourselves in public and private space. Political theorists tend to conceptualize identity in terms of difference. Anne Norton begins an essay on political identity with the aphoristic statement, "Meaning is made out of difference. ms William Connolly maintains that "an identity is established in relation to a series of differences that have become socially recognized. These differences are essential to its being. If they did not coexist as differences, it would not exist in its distinctness and solidity." Difference, as Connolly argues, implies "otherness"-a word that has distinctly negative connotations. Modern identities have a tendency to assume an essential and rigid character that appears as truth: "The maintenance of one identity (or field of identities) involves the conversion of some differences into otherness, into evil, or one of its numerous surrogates. Identity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty." 36 Difference is a useful concept if one wishes to focus on groups that have been excluded from the polity because of constructed otherness. It is less useful if one wishes to understand the process of collective identity formation on which any political identity ultimately turns. Difference, as an analytic category, can be as rigid as the "truths" it legitimates. Identity is an inescapable dimension of social life. Even Connolly admits that "each individual needs an identity; every stable way of life invokes claims to collective identity.m7 Identity may also be conceived in terms of 34 For social science theories of selfhood, see the collection of essays in The Category of the Person, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 35 Anne Norton, Reflections on Political Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 3· 36 William E. Connolly, IdentityiJJifference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 64. " Ibid., 158.

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21

similarities, or the commumtles of selves toward which individuals orient their actions. The social construction of identities involves the specification of a web of social relations or communities which envelop the self and through which individuals feel themselves identical with others.'" Theories of identity tend to share a focus on language and narrative as communicative vehicles of identity. Common language is the dimension of identity providing the discursive cues that direct likeminded subjects to each other. 39 The philosopher Charles Taylor's nuanced definition of identity that includes conceptions of ethics and community is a useful starting point for an analysis of the political construction of identity.'0 Taylor argues: "To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand." "Horizon" suggests an ethos that guides behavior, but it is not sufficient to structure identities or selves, "One is a self only among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to those who surround it." Identity without community is incomplete: "The full definition of someone's identity thus usually involves not only his stand on moral and spiritual matters but also some reference to defining community." 41 If we put aside the ethical component of Taylor's theory, an admittedly large putting aside, his conception of identity provides a theoretical entry to the fascist project.

Hierarchies of Identity Social, political, and economic institutions, the organizational forms of modern community, serve as arenas of identity. Institutions organize identities.42 A matrix of identities exist that may be categorized as public and 38 Much of the current sociological discussion of identity has been carried out at the level of theory and not empirical analysis. For example, see the essays in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 39 See Margaret R. Somers, "The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach," Theory and Society 23 (r994), 605-49. 4° For a discussion of the utility of Taylor to sociological analysis, see Craig Calhoun, "Morality, Identity, and Historical Explanation: Charles Taylor on the Sources of the Self," Sociological Theory 9 (Fall 1991), 232-63. 41 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 27, 35, 36. 42 For a discussion of how institutions create meaning, see James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions (New York: Free Press, 1989 ), 39-5 2; and Roger Friedland and Robert R. Alford, "Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions," in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, ed. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. 247-56.

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private. Public identities principally include citizenship and work identities that are institutionally buttressed by the legal organizations of the modern nation-state and the market. These identities are based on a conception of interest and rationality. Private identities originate in their purist forms as biology or kinship relations. Whether or not we acknowledge the social ties of kinship, by virtue of our existence we are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters. Family, whether absent or present, provides the institutional supports for our biological roles. Kinship identities have never escaped the legal system; for example, the law defines the parameters of marriage and inheritance. Nature, and not interest, structures these identities. But there are other forms of identities that are more fluid and not as easily located on a public/private continuum. Cultural identities-religious, national, regional, and ethnic-may be either public or private, depending on the political regime. Liberalism tends to legislate religious, regional, and ethnic identities out of the public sphere and to invoke selectively the affective dimensions of nationalism to support the nation-state. 43 All these identities are based on meanings-of religious practice, homeland, and race-and they generate powerful public emotions and militancy. Identities are neither essential nor purely constructed; they are multiple but not schizophrenic. 44 Individuals relate to and derive meaning from many communities of similar selves. This does not imply, however, that all identities carry equal meaning to those who participate in them. Many identities are, in Connolly's terminology, "contingent."45 These identities are circumstantial and more or less given at will. Some identities are more vulnerable to contingency than others. For example, one's vision of oneself as politically engaged may have more to do with structural opportunity or immediate grievances than with any long-term commitment to social or political change. Similarly, certain private identities such as marital status or sexual orientation may likewise be subject to opportunity and interest as well as social reinforcement. Identities belong to a category of objects Taylor has described as "hypergoods," by which he means objects that are of relatively more value to us than others. Even those of us who are not committed in so single-minded a way recognize higher goods. That is, we acknowledge second-order qualitative dis43 There is a burgeoning literature on nationalism. E. ]. Hobsbawm's discussion linking it to the development of the nation-state is most congruous to the issues I am raising (Nations and Nationalism since I78o [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 14-45). 44 Craig Calhoun, "Social Theory and the Politics of Identity," in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), 9-36. 45 Connolly, Identity\Dijference, 17 3.

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tinctions which define higher goods, on the basis of which we discriminate among other goods, attribute differential worth or importance to them, or determine when and if to follow them. Let me call higher-order goods of this kind "hypergoods," i.e., goods which not only are incomparably more important than others but provide the standpoint from which these must be weighed, judged, decided about." 46 Identities are felt as hierarchies. There are some identities that we value more than others, that we experience as "hypergoods," and some we experience as essentially "contingent." The felt force of some identities is so potent that we might be willing to die for them. It is those identities that generate powerful emotions carrying political importance. Religious, national, and ethnic identities frequently fall into this category.

States and Identity Political identities tread a difficult line because they require of their partisans a feeling that something exists outside the private self-the party, the state-that is worth dying for. War making, as Charles Tilly has argued, may be a major activity of the modern state, but conscription alone does not create soldiers.'7 The modern nation-state is the ideal type of modern political organization and a vehicle of mass political commitment. "Nation-state" is a dual concept, and a discussion of state and identity formation, in either liberal democratic or totalitarian states, requires that we uncouple this dyad. The "state" part is in the business of rule and focuses on bureaucratic efficiency and territorial claims;48 the "nation" part is in the business of creating emotional attachment to the state, or noncontingent identities. To borrow Benedict Anderson's familiar formulation, the modern nationstate is an "imagined community" that creates a spirit of "fraternity" that "makes it possible ... for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings." A principal goal of the nation side of the equation is to create a feeling of "attachment" to the state in the form of "love for the nation." The "nature" of "political love" can be deciphered from the ways in which languages describe its object: either in the vocabulary of kinship (motherland, Vaterland, patria) or that of home (heimat ... ). Both idioms denote something to which one is Taylor, Sources of the Self, 6 3. See Charles Tilly, "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime," in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Reuschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 198 5 ), r69-87. 48 Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978). 46

47

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naturally tied. As we have seen earlier, in everything "natural" there is always something unchosen. In this way, nation-ness is assimilated to skincolour, gender, parentage and birth-era-all those things one cannot help. And in these "natural ties" one senses what one might call the "beauty of gemeinschaft. " 49 The nation side of the nation-state dyad, though it appears to be the product of natural emotions, is highly constructed. The success of individual nineteenth-century nation-state projects lies in the strength of constructed emotion, and some were more successful than others. France is the paradigmatic case. As Lynn Hunt has shown, a repertoire of political inventions, symbolic practices, and images constituted the culture of the French Revolution; it was not until the nineteenth century that "peasants" became "Frenchmen" and the process of creating a modern French political identity tied to a nation-state was complete. 5° Historical and theoretical accounts demonstrate that nineteenth-century nation-states did not just come together as a result of the elective affinity of compatriots. They were forged from wars, the reorganization of cultural institutions (principally education), and the standardization oflanguage. National cultures were made at the expense of local and regional cultures. Though it is impossible to have any form of modern political organization without either a state or a nation, it is possible to have a nation without a state, or a state without a nation. The Arab- Israeli conflict may be construed as a problem of nations without states; the former Eastern European bloc countries and Soviet Union fall into the category of states without nations, which suggests why these states crumbled with the Berlin Wall. The uncoupling of nation and state forces a reexamination of the concept of totalitarian states. If states are simply the organizational and technological side of the nation-state dyad, then states may be conceived of as relatively neutral formal entities. Nation, in contrast, is a highly specific cultural construct tied to historical context. The nation side of the dyad introduces variance to the concept of state. Standard definitions of totalitarian states do not make these distinctions. For example, Linz summarizes the characteristics of a totalitarian state as (I) a monolithic center of power, (2) an exclusive ideology to which all must subscribe, and (3) mandatory citizen participation in the form of active and continued mobilization. He distinguishes between totalitarian and authori49 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 7, 141, 143. 50 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), and Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).

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5

tarian regimes based on the instrumental versus expressive character of the state. He places Nazi Germany in the former category and fascist Italy in the latter. 51 What is lacking in Linz's formulation is any discussion of the etiology of the totalitarian state form. If we accept historical accounts which suggest that nation-states are end products of a political process that bears greater resemblance to arranged marriage than to spontaneous coupling, we can think of totalitarian states as states without nations or states where the failure or weakness of the nationstate process has demanded a "hypernationalization" project. If we conceptualize fascism as a political ideal that denies the separation of the public and private self, then we can think of totalitarian states as the organizational form of that destroyed boundary. To the extent that all nation-states need to create citizens who will sacrifice some parts of their private selves to the state, whether their income in taxes or their bodies in war, then the terms "totalitarian" and "liberal-democratic" as demarcations of state forms start to appear as only differences of degree. Totalitarian and democratic as nominal categories have limited capacity to elucidate the process of state identity formation, which requires a conception of agency. Colonialism, which evokes a strong nation-state's imposing of its identity on weakly bounded territorial groups or nations of lesser stature, provides a better approximation of the political processes involved in the Italian fascist project than the rubric of totalitarian/ democratic. Timothy Mitchell's discussion of political identity captures the "normal" division between the public and private self. Mitchell argues: Political identity, therefore, never exists in the form of an absolute, interior self or community, but always an already-divided relation of self/other. Political identity, ... is no more singular or absolute than the identity of words in a system of writing. Just as the particularity of words ... is merely an effect of the differences that give rise to language, so difference gives rise to political identity and existence. There are no political "units," no atomistic, undivided selves; only relations or forces of difference, out of which identities are formed as something always self-divided and contingent. 52 Mitchell's analysis, influenced by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, would, carried to its logical conclusion, posit no difference between identity formation in a totalitarian state or in a democratic state. His analysis shifts 51 Juan J. Linz, "Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes," in Handbook of Political Science, ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, vol. 3 (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, I975), I9I-92, 275· 52 Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, I99I ), I67.

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when he takes up the issue of colonialism, however, and becomes congruent with my arguments about the Italian fascist project. According to Mitchell, colonialism affects identity by destroying the split between self and other, public and private: "Identity [under colonialism] now appears no longer self-divided, no longer contingent, no longer something arranged out of differences; it appears instead as something self-formed, and original. " 53 The colonial or fascist state represents a noncontingent undivided form of identity. Citizenship is the legal vehicle that codifies and solidifies national political identities. Citizenship, whether one accepts T. H. Marshall's definition of it as an attribute of persons living in a nation-state, or revisionist theories that view it as a boundary-making device or relational process, is minimally the mechanism that makes individuals feel as though they participate in the state. 54 Regimes, the constellation of political actors controlling the state at given historical moments, frequently resort to symbolic politics to orchestrate the affective dimension of citizenship. All regimes from democratic to totalitarian employ some form of symbolic politics. In democratic states, symbolic politics, practices, and objects are expressive entities that temporarily objectifY the state; in totalitarian or fascist states, symbolic politics, particularly ritual actions, attempt to obliterate the distinction between self and other. There is no necessary connection between the retreat to symbolic politics and its effects. The state fiction of totalitarianism should not be confused with the reality of totalitarianism. Representation captures the tension between fiction and reality. In Mitchell's analysis of colonial Egypt, colonialism by its existence defines reality-the world is the "exhibition." 55 Norton discusses representation: A representation preserves things in their absence. The representation-or the representative-presents something prior to itself. Each act of representation is a re-presentation, a presentation of something that has appeared before. It is repetitive. Yet each representation, occurring in a different context, attaches additional associations to the act or individual that is recalled, Ibid. T. H. Marshall, "Citizenship and Social Class," in Class, Citizenship, and Social Development: Essays by T. H. Marshall, intro. Seymour Martin Lipset (rpt., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 71-134; Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Margaret R. Somers, "Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy," American Sociological Review 58 (October 1993), 587-620. 55 Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 7-15. 53

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27

and disguises the significance of once-meaningful attributes. Thus representation shows itself to be at once endlessly repetitive and ever changing. 56 My approach to representation borrows from, and significantly departs from, what might be loosely defined as postmodern approaches to the study of politics. What Mitchell and Norton are elaborating is the polysemic nature of representation or "exhibition." My analysis follows this feature of the postmodern approach. Where it departs is that I argue that, unlike Gertrude Stein's characterization of Oakland, there is a there, there-even if it is not always clear of what it consists. Returning to Norton, I contend, first, what is preserved in absence is by no means certain, and second, the meaning of the representation is reinvented with its repetition. Representations of ideological power do not equal realities of power. Fascism as a political ideology and cultural program appears less protean if one redefines it as the fusion of the public and private self in the state. My redefinition suggests a rationale for the regime's reliance on public political rituals-the desire to create a new form of political community. The Italian fascist regime attempted to create a fascist political identity by merging the public/private self in public political rituals, or to create temporary communities of feeling in the public piazza in the absence of the democratic contractualism in the state. We now turn to those rituals. Communities of Feeling and the Politics of Emotion Nation-states may be imagined and felt as community, but the feelings and imaginings of national belonging are evanescent without an underlying structure of cultural institutions and symbolic practices. National languages and education systems as well as museums, monuments, and national anthems serve to keep the spirit of national belonging alive. States, such as fascist Italy, that are engaged in what I have labeled "hypernationalization" projects need to institute immediate and drastic measures to foster feelings of national incorporation. The public political spectacle was the dramatic enactment of fascist community and the expressive crucible in which fascist identity was forged. Italian men and women did not become fascist in the public piazza. They became fascist to the extent that they assumed a fascist identity in the schools, Fascist Party organizations, and labor corporations. The public spectacle was an arena of political emotion, a community of feeling, in which Italians of all ages were meant to feel themselves as fascists. 56

Norton, Reflections, 97·

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Making the Fascist Self

Emotion is central to the politics of spectacle. Emotion obliterates identity. It fuses self and other-subject and object. The experience of public political spectacle is analogous to the experience of music, a comparison fascist functionaries did not hesitate to make. Music, in the words of Susanne Langer, is the "tonal analogue of emotive life." Music is a highly articulate language without vocabulary. 57 Like music, emotion has a cognitive dimension. As Clifford Geertz argues in his discussion of the Balinese cockfight, ritual display can serve as a kind of "sentimental education" in its use of "emotion" for "cognitive ends": "What the cockfight says it says in a vocabulary of sentiment-the thrill of risk, the despair of loss, the pleasure of triumph. Yet what it says is not merely that risk is exciting, loss depressing, or triumph gratifYing, banal tautologies of affect, but that it is of these emotions, thus exampled, that society is built and individuals are put together." 58 Geertz's analysis, while pointing to the cognitive ends of emotion, is too close-ended as to ritual outcome. Ritual, by acting out emotion, includes indeterminacy. Political ritual creates a "liminal" space in which new identities may form. 59 Emotion may obliterate the old self, but there is no guarantee as to what form the new self or identity might assume. The fascist "communities of feeling" aimed to create fascist community and fascist identity. "Community of feeling" is my adaptation of Raymond Williams's concept of "structure of feeling." According to Williams, "structures of feeling" are "social experiences in solution." In his attempt to articulate the nondiscursive elements of aesthetic emotion, Williams contrasts "feeling" with discursive elements such as "world-view" and "ideology," which are linguistic and textual in their import. His analysis diverges from Geertz's in that it suggests the indeterminacy of emotional politics: "We are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs are in practice variable (including historically variable), over a range from formal assent with private dissent to the more nuanced interaction between selected and interpreted beliefs and acted and justified experiences. " 60 Scholars acknowledge the emotional dimension of fascist political practice and dismiss it as yet another feature of the politics of irrationality. Emotion as the basis of politics was not new. Emotion is the antithesis of modern political organization except when it is rigidly codified in the nation side of Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner's, 19 53), 7. Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973),449. 59 I borrow this well-known concept from Victor Turner. 60 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 133, 132. 57 58

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the nation-state dyad. Emotion is nonrational, but it is not irrational and it is intimately connected to the Italian fascist rejection of liberalism-the essence of political rationality. Italian fascism rejected discursive prose or linearity. It repudiated the word and the text. Argumentation, explanation, the scientific method were all aspects of modernity and rational discourse that fascism replaced with the primacy of feeling and emotion. 61 The fascist emphasis on feeling and emotion was a celebration of the nonrational, not the irrational, since fascist feelings aimed to communicate belonging and solidarity. The distinction Karl Mannheim makes between conservatism and liberalism is instructive regarding this point. 62 He discusses conservatism as valorizing the "qualitative" and the experiential and liberalism as valorizing the "quantitative" or cognitive dimensions of social life. According to Mannheim, "quantitative" encompasses a range of liberal values such as social equality and the belief in norms as a guide to action, whereas "qualitative" espouses the primacy of being or essences and a view of events as end points of the past. Although Mannheim's primary focus is Germany, his arguments are applicable to the distinctions I am drawing in the Italian case. Fascist propagandists, journalists, artists, and intellectuals generated torrents of words in fascist Italy. Yet they were words without referents. Ignazio Silane made this point in his parody of fascist politics, The School for Dictators. When asked what the fascist cry eia eia alala means, the author's persona replies: Nothing. It was a cry D'Annunzio invented during the war. You will find no trace of it in any language or dialect, and its own inventor gave it no rational meaning .... For the success of a fascist movement, such words are more valuable than any theoretical treatise on corporations .... The psalmlike chanting of incomprehensible texts has been a precious resource of mass religions in every age. Latin has never kept illiterate peasants from attending Catholic rites; on the contrary, it has always been a big help in attracting them. 63 61 Benedetto Croce makes this point in A History of Italy, I87I-I9I5, trans. Cecilia M. Ady (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929 ): "During the early years of the twentieth century, both in Italy and elsewhere, a reaction set in against the cult of science, or positivism" (237). Croce attributed this "reaction" to "the influence of foreign thinkers, Germans who were once more speculating over the conception of'values"' (238). 62 Karl Mannheim, "Conservative Thought," in From Karl Mannheim, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 132-33, 144, r66, r68-69. Croce's remark (see note 6 r) suggests that my evocation of Mannheim is not so far afield. 63 Ignazio Silane, Tbe School for Dictators, trans. William Weaver (New York: Atheneum, 1963), II2.

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Making the Fascist Self

"Ideology" is a word I use in a specialized sense to connote the fascist cultural project. It is a convenient matrix for a set of political and cultural practices but not a body of discursive ideas. Fascists did not believe in abstract values such as liberty, equality, fraternity. They believed in action and style-ideas that specifY means and not ends and that make the ends of fascist action extremely malleable. The fascist belief in style has derailed attempts to codifY fascist ideology. Scholars' searches for doctrinal coherence have misread the issue of political style and drawn the incorrect conclusion that Italian fascism was inchoate. 64 The Italian fascist commitment to style and action makes ritual action an excellent venue for an analysis of the fascist project. The rally and the parade have been interpreted as a sign of the destruction of the public sphere under fascism. I argue that public spectacle was the regime's attempt to create temporary fascist communities of emotional attachment that would create bonds of solidarity which would last long after participants left the piazza. The public piazza was the cathedral of fascist culture, a nonliberal public sphere based on performance and not text. What these performances "meant" was indeterminate. Historian David Cannadine points to the difficulties involved in studying the relation of politics, emotion, and ritual with a felicitous simile: "Ceremonial is like the snow: an insubstantial pageant, soon melted into thin air. The invisible and ephemeral are, by definition, not the easiest of subjects for scholars to study." 65 The next section discusses my methodological approach to capturing the "snow," or specifYing the indeterminacy of fascist public spectacle.

Fascist Ritual and Political Communication

Ritual and Representation From Foucault's spectacle of the guillotine to analyses of the political culture of revolutions, studies of cultural politics assume that public political rituals, such as the events that proliferated in fascist Italy, are potent vehicles of political communication and meaning. 66 Public political ritual is performance; and performance, whether it occurs in the tightly bounded world of 64 For an articulation of this position, see Adrian Lyttelton, introduction to Italian Fascism from Pareto to Gentile (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 36. 65 David Cannadine, "Introduction: Divine Rites of Kings," in Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, ed. David Cannadine and Simon Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1. 66 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 47-57. For example, Hunt, French Revolution; Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); James Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993 ).

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3r

the theater or the more permeable social space of a public piazza, is a highly elusive entity because its effects are experiential. The experiential or performative nature of ritual, coupled with assumptions about the efficacy of political ritual, drives the methodological retreat to "thick descriptions" of unique ritual events. Geertz's study ofNegara, the "theater state," is typical of this mode of analysis. Geertz argues that the state in nineteenth-century Bali was pure spectacle and concludes, "The dramas of the theater state, mimetic of themselves, were, in the end, neither illusions nor lies, neither sleight of hand nor make-believe. They were what there was." 67 Textual exegesis of political ritual frequently fails to uncouple the relation between ritual activity and political meaning, thus leaving assumptions about political efficacy unchallenged. Such exegesis suggests that representations of power equal realities of power, or that, to paraphrase Norton, what is preserved in absence is the power of the state. The analytic and methodological discussion that follows is an argument for complexity in the face of the surface transparency of the fascist public rituals that form the core empirical section of this book. Theories of ritual focus on questions of definition that are inextricably linked to issues of meaning. How we draw the parameters of ritual circumscribes the range of interpretive methodologies we apply to the study of ritual. Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life is the Archimedean point from which any theoretical study of ritual begins. Three features of Durkheim's analysis affected the development of theories of ritual: the equation of ritual with religion; the idea of collective representation, which pointed to the symbolic function of ritual practice; and the generalized classification scheme of sacred and profane. 68 Although social scientists no longer treat ritual as necessarily bound to religious practice, they have retained their interest in the role of ritual symbols and the dichotomy between sacred and profane. The symbolic dimension of ritual encompasses a range of definitions and disciplinary orientations. Steven Lukes defines ritual as "rule-governed activity of a symbolic character." In Ritual, Politics, and Power, David Kertzer defines ritual as "action wrapped in a web of symbolism. Standardized, repetitive action lacking such symbolization is an example of habit or custom and not ritual. Symbolization gives the action much more important meaning. " 69 Anthropologists have criticized the sacred/profane distinction as a sim67 Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I98o), I36. 68 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, I965), I?, 22, 26, 52. 69 Steven Lukes, "Political Ritual and Social Integration," Sociology 9 (I 97 5 ), 29 I; David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, I988), 9·

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plistic dichotomy that replicates the value system of the observer. 70 Such criticism suggests three problems that underlie the semiotic and discursive analysis of ritual events. First, this method continues to elide the distinction between participant and observer as separate interpreting subjects; second, treating ritual as a text contributes to its conceptualization as an object rather than an action; and third, it focuses attention on the content rather than the form of ritual. 71 A plausible account of the meaning of political ritual requires the resolution of each of these problems. The distinction between observer and participant is not as simple as it would appear at first glance. Within the anthropological literature, the distinction is predicated on a fieldworker who is an outsider venturing into a "foreign" culture to observe the social or religious ritual behavior of the "native" insiders. Typically, fieldworkers conduct their observation of ritual in the present. 72 Analysis of political ritual presents a level of complexity missing in religious or social ritual because the categories of observer and participant are multiple. Historical analysis offers the vantage point of distance in parsing these categories. First, the social analyst in the instance of historical analysis of political ritual is not strictly speaking an observer; rather, he or she is the interpreter of the representations of multiple observers. I constructed my analysis of fascist political ritual from the representations of journalists, photographers, and regime propagandists. The citizens who lined the streets of Italy's cities and towns watching the fascists march by were observers whose voices go unheard. Second, the participant is not simply the person standing in the piazza forming part of the ritual display. Participants may be those who create or design the rituals, those who perform the political rites, or those who witness it from the outside. This last group might also constitute observers. In the case of fascist ritual, the regime decided the scope and range of events, the local and national Fascist Party mobilized bodies to rally in the piazzas to perform the political rites, and the Italian citizens lined the streets for events that interrupted the daily rhythms of work, commerce, and lei7° For example, Jack Goody, "Religion and Ritual: The Definitional Problem," British Journal of Sociology 12 (1961), 143, 149, 152. Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff, "Secular Ritual: Forms and Meanings," in Secular Ritual, ed. Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Meyerhoff (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977), in a critique of Mary Douglas, argue that it is difficult to establish the boundaries of the sacred and profane independently of the cultural predispositions of the observer (19). 71 Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), emphasizes the distinction between ritual as action and as object (42). 72 On the problems of contemporaneous observation, see Sally Falk Moore, "Explaining the Present: Theoretical Dilemmas in Processual Ethnography," American Ethnology 14 (1987), 727-36.

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33

sure. An analysis of fascist ritual that simply read the text of the available representations, or described it as the sacralization of public space in the name of the regime, would fail to capture the meaning of the ritual to its participants broadly defined and would skim the surface of the official meanings of the event.

Ritual as Cultural Action In the Elementary Forms, Durkheim did not ignore the action dimension of ritual. He distinguished between the "rite" and "belief'' components of religion. Beliefs were the repository of representations or symbols, whereas rites were the locations of "determined modes of action." 73 Although analysts have tended to elide this distinction in their empirical research, actions are as salient as symbols in definitions of ritual. 74 Ritual is a form of "patterned" and "formulaic" action that establishes order against the indeterminacy of random temporal and spatial organization. 75 In their discussion of secular ritual, Sally Falk Moore and Barbara Meyerhoff argue that the formal properties of ritual, such as staging, repetition, action, and stylization, are intrinsic to its message. They conclude: "Ritual is in part a form, and a form which gives certain meanings to its contents. The work of ritual, then, is partly attributable to its morphological characteristics. Its medium is part of its message."' 6 Kertzer takes a similar stance: "Ritual action has a formal quality to it .... Ritual action is repetitive and, therefore, often redundant, but these very factors serve as important means of channeling emotion, guiding cognition, and organizing social groups. " 77 This sample of definitions lends support to two propositions: first, ritual is a form of cultural action; and second, ritual derives its distinction as a cultural entity from its formal characteristics. These propositions have implications that support my contention and evoke Norton's point that meaning is embedded not in the representation of action but in the experience of continued exposure to ritual representations, or the repetition of ritual action. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 5 I. For example, Robert Wuthnow, Meaning and the Moral Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, I987), I09; Lukes, "Political Ritual," 290; Bell, Ritual Theory, 69-93. Goody, "Religion and Ritual," notes that ritual applies to the "action" rather than the "belief" component of magic and religious phenomena ( I4 7) and defines ritual as "a category of standardized behavior (custom) in which the relationship between means and ends is not 'intrinsic'" (I59). 75 Jack Goody, "Against 'Ritual': Loosely Structured Thoughts on a Loosely Defined Topic," in Secular Ritual, ed. Moore and Meyerhoff~ 33; David Parkin, "Ritual as Spatial Direction and Bodily Division," in Understanding Rituals, ed. Daniel De Coppet (London: Routledge, I992), I8. 76 "Secular Ritual," 7-8. 77 Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 9. 73

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By studying ritual as a type of cultural action, we can develop plausible narratives of how the citizens of fascist Italy received the regime's cultural messages. Reception includes assimilation, resistance, and in some instances reinvention. I argue that the form of ritual action is more important than the specific content, although my analysis does not ignore content. Form is what we recognize as implicit, whereas content is variable. Form is central to a politics of emotion that eschewed text. Ritual action takes place in real time-it is diachronic as well as synchronic. By diachronic, I mean the repetition of ritual acts over days, months, years. Analysts tend to assume the synchronic nature of ritual time and focus on calendars and schedules and the breaking up of singular temporal units such as days or years. 78 Victor Turner's processual view of ritual incorporates time into the study of ritual and suggests that ritual meaning is located in the long, as well as short, ritual duree. 79 Turner argues that ritual activities are composed of social dramas that exist as single instances or sequential accumulations of events: Social dramas and social enterprises-as well as other kinds of processual units-represent sequences of social events, which, seen retrospectively by an observer, can be shown to have structure. Such "temporal" structure, unlike atemporal structure . . . is organized primarily through relations in time rather than in space, though, of course, cognitive schemes are themselves the result of a mental process and have processual qualities." 80 Social drama as an analytic frame brings time and historicity to ritual theory. In later work, Turner explicitly links these features to ritual meaning. He argues that meaning is the end of process: "Meaning is apprehended by looking back over a process in time. We assess the meaning of every part of a process by its contribution to the total result. Meaning is connected with the consummation of a process-it is bound up with termination, in a sense, with death. The meaning of any given factor in a process cannot be assessed until the whole process is past." 81 Ritual action's formal characteristics, such as staging, permit us to identity its meaningful patterns. Ritual patterns are powerful interpretive prisms and vehicles of political communication. First, they address the issue of regime intention, because they suggest that there was some deliberate political attempt to create the pattern; second, they address the question of citizen reception, because they See, for example, Ozouf, Festivals, r6r-66. Victor Turner, "Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors," in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 23-59. '' Ibid., 3 5- 3 6. 81 Victor Turner, "The Anthropology of Performance," in The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ, 1988), 97-98. 78 79

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display formal properties that a body of citizens might recognize over time. Patterns take ritual form and time into account and allow us to separate analytically the observer from the participant. In short, they permit us to formulate plausible and nondistorting narratives of political meaning. Identifying patterns of ritual action over time in a specific historical context, such as Italy during the fascist period, enables us to establish what was ordinary, customary, and recognizable in fascist political ritual. The mapping of the familiar has the added advantage of allowing us to construct a story of political meaning that, first, does not conflate the observer and the participant and, second, holds separate analytically, if not empirically, the subcategories of participation.

Intention and Reception To capture the "meaning" of political ritual, in this case fascist ritual, we must distinguish two levels of meaning and sites of participation: the meaning of public spectacle to the regime-the creator of political ritual; and the meaning of spectacle to the citizens-the audience at whom these events were aimed. The first level of meaning involves questions of political intention. Imputed intention does not imply that the regime could impose whatever meanings it chose. Fascist regimes, and the Italian fascist regime in particular, may be based on the politics of nonrationality, but they are not irrational. Political symbolism is useless if no one understands it. Although no regime can guarantee the effects of its aesthetic actions, some symbols are more likely to resonate with a public than others. How a regime goes about choosing symbolic actions that have a greater probability of resonance than others has to do with its ability to co-opt or create cultural practices that form recognizable or comprehensible genres. 82 The problem as I am' stating it may be recast in terms frequently applied to aesthetics, that is, as a problem of authorial intention and audience reception, or, in the language of ritual analysis, that of observer and participant. The case studies that follow explore the interaction between regime intention and citizen reception. I constructed them, to borrow the Comaroffs' metaphor, as a "conversation" between the colonizer and the colonized." 3 Ritual is a form of social action whose consequences may owe more to the cultural schema and resources, to invoke Sewell, that its designers have at 82 For sociological accounts of the issue of recognition and resonance, see Wendy Griswold, "A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture," Sociological Methodology I4 (I987), I7-20, and Michael Schudson, "How Culture Works: Perspectives from Media Studies on the Efficacy of Symbols," Theory and Society I 8 (I 9 89 ), I 67-70. 83 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I99I), I99·

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their disposal than to any political meaning it seeks to convey, and whose principal consequences may be as unintended as intended. My central analytic argument is that the fascist meaning or identity which was created, which was understood and internalized, lies in the space between intention and reception. Period and genre as analytic frames provide a convenient shorthand that lends terminological consistency to the case studies and structures the narrative construction of the interaction between intention and reception. Period, historically plausible time segments within which events can be mapped, suggests regime intention if we can link ritual events to political events. Genre, standard ritual forms, suggests audience recognition if we can establish their repetition. Period and genre are the scaffolding for the empirical study of fascist ritual that follows. History, the careful analysis of content and context, is the basis for these classification schemes.

Period Because the Italian fascist regime lasted twenty-one years, it affords a methodological opportunity to trace changes and variation in fascist ritual. The years between 1922 and 1943 fall into five historically sensible periods in which diverse political events affected patterns of ritual action. 84 The first of the five, the Matteotti period, begins on October 28, 1922, the day Mussolini marched on Rome and took over the Italian state, and ends with the murder of the socialist parliamentarian Giacomo Matteotti on June 10, 1924. This political murder, which scholars ascribe to the fascist regime, ended the period during which Mussolini attempted to govern with some semblance of a political coalition. The second period begins after the Matteotti murder and ends on March 24, 1929, the day of the plebiscite when Mussolini received the highly orchestrated unanimous vote of confidence from the Italian electorate that consolidated his dictatorship. 85 The consolidation of fascist power characterizes this period. The regime focused on building a fascist infrastructure, consolidating its rule, and legitimating itself both nationally and internationally. 84 The periodization follows standard historical works: Adrian Lyttelton, Tbe Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, I9I9-I929 (rpt., Princeton: Princeton University Press, I987), and Renzo De Felice, Mussolini Il Duce: Gli anni del consenso, I929-I936, vol. I (Turin: Einaudi, I 97 4 ); and also fascist propaganda: It primo e secondo libro del fascista (Rome: Partito Nazionale Fascista, I94I ). 85 The "plebiscite of I929" was a highly rigged election in which Mussolini proposed a list of four hundred fascist names for parliament and the nation was asked to support them en bloc. Negative votes were discouraged with threats of violence and other less tangible forms of reciprocity. Denis Mack Smith reports that 98.4 percent of the Italian population voted yes, although many probably did not bother to vote at all. See Mussolini (London: Granada, I98I), I9I-93·

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The third period runs from the plebiscite to September 8, 1935, when Mussolini decided to invade Ethiopia. During this period of consensus, relative political and social stability prevailed within fascist Italy as the regime began to build the fascist state and develop fascist institutions. The tranquility of the consensus period ended when Mussolini embarked on the building of a fascist colonial empire. The first step in this process was the Ethiopian campaign, and its culmination was Italian entry into World War II on the side of the Axis powers. This period of mobilization began in September 193 5 and ended June ro, 1940, when Italy entered the war on the side of nazi Germany. The last period, the World War II years, is bounded by the end of the regime on July 25, 1943, when Mussolini was voted out of office at the Grand Council meeting. A puppet fascist government existed at Salo until the war ended in r 94 5, but the regime itself officially ended with Mussolini's fall. Genre

The various forms of public political spectacle that proliferated in fascist Italy suggest discernible ritual genres. From among the numerous narratives and events I traced, I identified five genres: commemoration, celebration, demonstration, symposia, and inauguration. These genres were not pure types, and they frequently appear as a collage of various forms of ritual action. I use them not to reify ritual experience but to develop a classificatory vocabulary that suggests the aggregate characteristics of the multiple ceremonies and events that transformed the Italian physical and social landscape during the fascist period. Commemorative events marked the anniversaries of significant events in Italian history, such as the Vittoria, which signaled the end ofWorld War I, and in fascist history, such as the March on Rome. Public funerals for local fascist heroes or memorial services for national fascist figures also fell into the commemorative category. The watermark of the commemorations was the past as embodied in dead events and dead persons. In contrast, celebrations reveled in the present and the future. They included visits of distinguished persons such as Mussolini, ongoing fascist events such as the leva fascista (the passage of fascist youth from one level of the party to the next), birthdays of living fascist heroes, as well as sporting and theatrical events. The visit of an emissary from Rome to Italian cities and towns was the principal symbolic vehicle that the regime and party used to draw the periphery to the center. Distinguished party members visited at both commemorations and celebrations. In contrast to commemorations and celebrations, demonstrations were purely expressive events, usually rallies, held to display public emotion in

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support of fascism. As a genre of event, demonstrations were eclectic as to content. What set them apart as a distinct type was that they all claimed the appearance of spontaneous collective emotion and tended to be large rather than small events. Symposia included national-level congresses and conventions as well as lectures and meetings at the Fascist Party headquarters. Inaugurations consisted of the initiations of public works, such as the opening of a new building or the laying of a plaque to honor a local hero. Symposia were bound to persons; inaugurations were bound to place, as they frequently entailed the dedication of new buildings. Fascism, as political idea, is best understood as an ideology that fuses the public and private self. In the Italian fascist case, this fusion occurred de jure in the state and emotively in spectacles in the public piazza. The public ritual created a "community of feeling," a metaphorical phrase for the emotional fusing of the two dimensions of the self in public space. Fascist political rituals did not necessarily represent fascist power, and the shape of ritual events must be addressed as an independent analytic category-the interplay of schematas and resources. We now turn to the historical context, or systems of cultural meanings, that provided the schematas and resources for fascist ritual production.

CHAPTER

2

Imagining a New Political Community: The Landscape of Ritual Action

The Boundaries of Political Imaginings Intellectuals imagine movements; people live regimes. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, political imagining flowered. Intellectuals who had imagined nations in the nineteenth century imagined new citizens, new communities, and spectacle states in the twentieth. If the politics of prose embodied in the final carving up of Europe into bureaucratically organized nation-states characterized the nineteenth century, the politics of theater characterized the early twentieth century. Rationality and the "career open to talent" governed nineteenth-century politics; emotion and the "career open to art" governed early-twentieth-century political movements. Artists as well as politicians and social philosophers became engaged in the political discourse of the early twentieth century. The intertwining of spectade and politics was a routine component of the political practices of earlytwentieth-century European utopian movements and fascist regimes.' George Masse argues that drama represented "tangible expressions of a new political style," which "was based upon artistic presuppositions" and aimed "to transform political action into drama. m At first glance Italy appeared to exist at the forefront of the aestheticization of politics. Italian futurists led by poet and playwright Filippo Tommaso Marinetti smashed bourgeois cultural ideals before fascists smashed socialist workers' 1 See George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (rpt., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991 ); for the Italian case, see Emilio Gentile, It culto del littorio (Rome: Laterza, 1993 ). 2 Mosse, Nationalization, 8.

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organizations. In I 9 I 5, Marinetti wrote, "Everything of value is theatrical (Tutto e teatrale quando ha valore)," and staged futurist serate, anarchical theatrical evenings, in which he provoked his audience by putting glue on their chairs. 3 In I9I9, he led a group of arditi as they burned the offices of VAvanti, the socialist newspaper in Milan. 4 Gabriele D'Annunzio, the aging poet, novelist, and dramatist, mobilized the same arditi to storm Fiume, the city on the Italian Yugoslavian border which had been left in dispute at the end of the First World War. 5 The career ofD'Annunzio fused art and life. As the warrior poet, he used the Fiume episode to synthesize action and expression in a political drama. 6 But movements must turn into parties if political visions are to have constituencies; and parties into regimes if they are to have social and political consequences. The flamboyant actions and noisy proclamations of the aesthetic avant-garde drew international attention and captured the imagination of Italian university students. 7 This youthful constituency represented a small and elite group of Italians, however. In the main, the aesthetic avantgarde was far removed from the concerns of ordinary Italian men and women, and when it came to practical politics, they were hindrances rather than assets. When the Milanese Fascist Party with Mussolini at its head ran in the local elections in I9I9, futurists including Marinetti were on the electoral list and the fascists suffered a crushing defeat. When Mussolini and the fascists ran again in I92I, the artists were gone from the slate and Mussolini won. During the years of the regime, Marinetti and D'Annunzio were re3 F. T. Marinetti, "II teatro futurista sintetico (1915)," in Opere di F. T. Marinetti, ed. Luciano De Maria, val. 2, Teoria e invenzione futurista (Milan: Mondadori, 1968), 100. For a description of futurist serate, see Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: Dutton, 1971), 12-19. On the connection between futurism and fascism, see George L. Masse, "The Political Culture of Italian Futurism: A General Perspective," Journal of Contemporary History 25 (1990), 253-68; on aesthetics and fascism, see Walter L. Adamson, Avant-garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 4 The arditi, "daring ones," were groups of students and war veterans drawn largely from the middle classes. Many, such as Giuseppe Bottai, later became prominent figures in the fascist regime. The arditi were heavily influenced by futurism and fancied themselves warrior/artists, thus resolving the split between thought and action which they saw as plaguing bourgeois liberalism. See Ferdinanda Cordova, Arditi e legionari dannunziani (Padua: Marsilio, 1969 ). On the storming of the press offices, see Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, I9I9-I929 (rpt., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 52. 5 Ernst Nolte (Three Faces of Fascism, trans. Leila Vannewitz [New York: New American Libraty, 1969], 242-52) provides a brief description of the Fiume episode that captures its spirit of drama and romantic adventurism. He describes Fiume as the "first successful bluff in postwar Europe" and claims that "never in the world's history has there been a more impressive farce or one with greater implications for the future" ( 24 3 ). 6 See Michael A. Ledeen, The First Duce: D'Annunzio at Fiume (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Universiry Press, 1977 ). 7 For a comparative analysis of the political affinities of educated European youth in the early twentieth century, see Robert Wahl, The Generation of I9I4 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979 ), esp. 16o-zo2.

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duced to ossified cultural icons to be pulled out of the closet when political exigencies demanded their presence. From 1922, spectacle replaced aesthetics as a defining force within popular fascist cultural practice. Spectacles and public political rituals at the local and national level multiplied in fascist Italy. Experiential, emotional, and dramatic, spectacle entailed more than the simple gathering of masses in public spaces. While citizens participated in public spectacle, they were part of in a new political community that they would internalize when they left the piazza and stopped marching. The cultural resources of fascist Italy, such as a limited national linguistic capacity and urban cityscapes that provided natural stages, made spectacle a favored form of political communication. In the public piazza, the complexities of the Italian past played themselves out against the fascist agenda for the Italian future. The fascist regime sought to penetrate the principal sources of the Italian self-religion and family-and to replace them with a fascist self based on a new conception of citizenship that fused the public and private self in the state. Religion and family provided cultural schemata, or rules, formal codes of behavior and symbols, which Italians implicitly understood and from which they fashioned their private understandings of themselves. Sewell has argued that "the real test of knowing a rule is to be able to apply it successfully in unfamiliar cases."" Transposability suggests cultural knowledge of schemas or rules. The fascist regime used the resources of the stateparties and laws-to "play" with the rules of Italian culture. The power to transpose does not imply that new cultural knowledge will emerge. Culture, in the broad anthropological sense of that term, established the mental boundaries within which a new Italian fascist political community could be imagined. Preestablished and deeply held cultural norms and practices were resistant to political manipulation, and they limited the regime's capacity to imagine other foci for its cultural project. Just as the regime could not create political culture out of whole cloth, so too the citizens of Italy, whether or not they were supporters of fascism, were not blank slates on which the regime might fashion its ideological designs. Political, social, and cultural factors that even the creators of fascist culture could not escape leveled the terrain on which the fascist project was built. The Dead Weight of the Risorgimento The Italian nation-state project, the Risorgimento, was a font of cultural and political memory from which the fascist regime crafted its political narratives. Risorgimento meant "rebirth," and the term was, as historian Clara ' William H. Sewell, Jr., "A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation," American Journal of Sociology 98 (July I992), I8.

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Lovett notes, carefully chosen, instead of "revolution," which the fascists favored, to suggest a pact between Italy's past and future. 9 But the future that the Risorgimento looked toward was hardly radiant, and the past was highly fragmented. Three features of the unification project are salient to the analysis here: ( r) there was a relatively short time span between official unification in r86o and the advent of the fascist regime in 1922; (2) the Italian nation-state came together relatively late in comparison with England, France, and Germany; and ( 3) possibly most important of all, unification was not popular. In r86o, Giuseppe Garibaldi's band of "Thousand" (paramilitary volunteers) and King Vittorio Emanuele's troops met at Teano, a small city outside Naples. 10 The "handshake" exchanged between the king and Garibaldi fused the north and south of the Italian peninsula, and Italy was born. The meeting at Teano and the subsequent political unification of Italy (the first "Italian" parliament met in January r86r) was the result of years of political machinations on the part of Count Camillo Cavour, a Torinese aristocrat popularly viewed as the "father" of Italy. Cavour died just six months after the unification, and an assortment of liberals, monarchists, and nationalists was left to forge the new nation-state. "Italy" had a weak hold on the imagination and consciousness of a people who were now forced to think of themselves as Italians. To say that Italy was culturally fragmented in r 8 6o is to attenuate the deeply felt regional identities and loyalties that divided the inhabitants of the new nation-state. Historians so frequently cite Massimo D'Azeglio's epigram on Italian culture, "Having made Italy, we must now make Italians," that they rarely reference it. Commenting on the condition of Italy in r86o, Christopher Seton-Watson has noted: "Parochialism and provincialism were deep-seated, reinforced by the still living traditions of the Renaissance Communes. Few outside the restricted educated class thought of themselves as primarily Italians. Among the people there was not even a common language. Piedmont and Lombardy were divided from Naples and Sicily not only by physical space but by the space of centuries." 11 In r86o, Italy had a mere 2,404 kilometers of railroad track, mostly in Piedmont; the Kingdom of Naples had fewer than roo kilometers. 12 As late as 1900, Italy had fewer kilometers of track than 9 Clara Lovett, The Democratic Movement in Italy, I83o-r876 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), r. 10 I rely on Christopher Duggan, A Concise History of Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 117-42, for my sketch of the events of unification. 11 Christopher Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, I870-I925 (London: Methuen, 1967), 13. " Duggan, Concise History, 127; Benedetto Croce, A History of Italy, I87I-I9I5, trans. Cecilia M. Ady (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 51·

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either France or Germany. 13 Robert Putnam's recent study of democracy in contemporary Italy suggests that patterns of civic engagement developed in Renaissance Communes still determine Italian political practices. 14 The concept of a unified, democratic, and liberal Italy had limited popular appeal. Democracy and liberalism in Italy meant little more than a united territory and a parliament. This conception of nonaristocratic government was thin by contemporary standards of democratization and even by nineteenth-century standards of bourgeois states, but it was nonetheless a considerable advance for an agricultural territory dominated by nobles, brigands, and bandits. In comparison with France in 1789 and Germany in I 8 50, Italy lacked a prominent commercial, let alone industrial, bourgeoisie. The principal partisans of the Risorgimento were a group of men belonging to the relatively small social category of what we would today describe as the educated middle classes, university graduates whose parents possessed neither land nor capital. 15 The French Revolution as a model for political practice did not extert a strong influence on the Italian popular mentality. Italy was physically isolated from the rest of Europe until r87r, when the Frejus Tunnel was built through the Alps. Intellectuals made the trek across the Alps to Paris, but the marauding armies of Napoleon also made the trip in the other direction. 16 In Italy, the work of mass-producing the traditions that were the glue of French, German, and even British nineteenth-century nation-state projects was beset with obstacles. 17 Unification was as much a French as "Italian" invention. The monarchy, a fundamental guardian of national tradition, was neither popular nor indigenous in Italy. The House of Savoy was French, and many Italians viewed it as foreign. Cavour orchestrated the unification of Italy from Piedmont in the northern corner of the new Italy. Piedmont and its capital, Turin, where the first parliament met, were culturally French. Cavour's first language was French, and the father of Italy spoke Italian only when necessary and with difficulty. Even the territory was contested. Advocates of unification found it difficult to determine where Italy began and 13 Italy had 16,429 kilometers of track in comparison with France's 38,109 and Germany's 51,678 (Duggan, Concise History, 127). 14 Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. 121-62. 15 Lovett, Democratic Movement, 68. 16 On the influence of the French Revolution on Italian nationalist thinking, see Adrian Lyttelton, "The National Question in Italy," in The National Question in Europe in Historical Context, ed. Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 63-75· 17 See Eric Hobsbawm, "Mass Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 263-307.

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ended. Italy's northern borders were in continual dispute, in part because Austria and France had spent most of the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth invading. Cultural dissonance was not the only legacy of the Risorgimento. It left an intellectual stamp in the figure of Giuseppe Mazzini. According to Benedetto Croce, Mazzini was a complicated figure who did not grasp the practical dimensions of political life and who "shut himself up in a kind of organized Utopia, derived from Saint-Simon, invoking with quasi-religious prayers and exhortations an imaginary being called the People." Mazzini was forsaken by an elite who thought him "vague" and by workers, "real" Italian people, who turned to socialism. 18 Written in I929 during the period of fascist regime consolidation, Croce's analysis, which aimed to discredit a Risorgimento hero whom the fascists had resurrected, had more than a grain of truth. In practice, Mazzini did little for Italian unification, but his view of politics that posited a direct link between God and the people resonated powerfully with certain strands of the anti-Catholic and anticlerical Italian intellectual classes. Mazzini was the "spiritual" voice of the new Italy and a quasi-mystical figure who, except for a brief time in Italy in I 849, spent the greater part of his adult life in London organizing conspiracies and patriotic movements in various parts of Europe. 19 In I 8 3 I in Marseilles, he founded "Young Italy," a society of exiled Italian revolutionaries. Young Italy was a "faith and a mission" unmediated by the institutional shackles of the Catholic Church. 20 In contrast to Cavour, who advocated a free church in a free state and championed the liberal separation of church and state, Mazzini espoused a new political religion based on the motto "God and People." The "nation" was the arena where the "people" realized their essential selves. Mazzini celebrated the cultural meaning of the Italian family. A fascist school textbook cited his slogan, "The family is the Fatherland of the heart," to underscore the fascist regime's appropriation of the family. 21 Mazzini was the voice of an "intransigent unitarianism" with a "Messianic streak" that seemed to speak to the I84os. 22 He also spoke to the I920S and I930s. "God," "Nation," "Family," and "People" were the key words of Mazzini's political Croce, History of Italy, 73· See Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 20 Lovett, Democratic Movement, II-2I. 21 Vincenzo Biloni, Cultura fascista: Secondo i programmi delle scuole secondarie d'avviamento professionale (Brescia: Giulio Vannini, 1933 ), 14 3. School textbooks required the state's sanction before they could be employed, which made them official fascist documents (Herbert W. Schneider and Shephard B. Clough, Making Fascists [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929], 98-99 ). 22 Lyttelton, "National Question in Italy," 82-83. 18

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religion that the fascist regime borrowed to legitimate its own cultural project. A State without A Nation In 1922, sixty years after unification, Italy remained a state without a nation. "Feeling" Italian was a tenuous emotion. Nationalism as ideology had as limited an appeal as unification. The Italian Nationalist Association, founded in 1910 by Enrico Corradini, was principally a literary organization. The crisis over whether to intervene in World War I and the subsequent loss of Italian territory in the war provided the opportunity for nationalism to emerge as a mass political force. But fascism easily and expeditiously coopted nationalism. Mussolini viewed nationalism's emergence as a popular ideology, as evidenced by the development of nationalist syndical organizations, or labor unions, as an opportunity to expand the base of his fascist movement. Between 1919 and 1922, he harnessed the rhetoric of nationalism to the organizational forces of fascism. The Fascist Party and the Nationalist Association merged in 1923 after fascism came to power. 23 The standard institutional buttresses-education, common language, and print culture-of the nation side of the nation-state dyad were weak and ineffective. Scholars have frequently noted the widespread theatricality and emotionality of Italy and its citizens. This was not simply a biological or cultural trait. Italians could not speak to one another very easily. Lexicographers had been lobbying since the eighteenth century to promulgate the Tuscan dialect as the official language of Italy. They were joined by literary figures in the early nineteenth century. 24 Yet Italians by and large communicated in their local dialects. At the time of unification, only 2.5 percent of the population spoke Italian. 25 The standardization of the legal system with the passage of the civil code in 1865 and the penal code in 1889 forced members of the state bureaucracy to have a working knowledge of Italian. The education system did little to diffuse the language. As Bolton King and Thomas Okey, two early-twentieth-century British social observers, noted: "Education is the gloomiest chapter in Italian social history. . . . There have been thirty-three Education Ministers since 1860, each eager to distinguish himself by upsetting his predecessor's work. Money has been stinted, and State and communes, lavish in all else, have economized in the 23 Mabel Berezin, "Created Constituencies: Fascism and the Italian Middle Classes," in Splintered Classes: Politics and the Lower Middle Classes in Interwar Europe, ed. Rudy Koshar (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990), 149. 24 Bruno Migliorini and T. Gwynfor Griffith, The Italian Language (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 310-n; Lyttelton, "National Question in Italy," 72-73. 25 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 38.

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most fruitful of national investments. m 6 King and Okey painted a portrait of schools in disrepair, schoolteachers on charity, and a general indifference to education among a poor and, for the most part, illiterate population chained to local dialect. In the late nineteenth century, theater schools, a middleclass phenomenon, did as much as the education system to promulgate spoken Italian. 27 The problem with language made the Italian public sphere, the hallmark of political modernity, comparatively weak. 28 The normal channels of liberal political discourse-newspapers and literary circles-existed, although they were inaccessible to many Italians. As late as 1921, Italy reported illiteracy rates ranging from a high of over 50 percent in the south to 25 percent in the center. Rates were in the single digits in the inqustrialized north. 29 Antonio Gramsci recounted that while he was in prison in Milan, newspapers were available but the prisoners, including political dissidents, chose to read the Sports Gazette -if they read at all. According to Gramsci, Italy lacked a culture of print: "Even today, spoken communication is a means of ideological diffusion which has a rapidity, a field of action, and an emotional simultaneity far greater than written communication (theatre, cinema and radio, with loudspeakers in public squares, beat all forms of written communication, including books, magazines, newspapers and newspapers on walls)but superficially, not in depth.mo Public spectacle was a convenient and rational mode of political communication in a culture that rejected text in favor of gesture and performance. Italy had a ritual tradition of public festival dating back to the Renaissance. 31 Public festival took the form of commemoration of local saints, Catholic holy days, and local festivals celebrating the harvesting of grapes and other commerce-oriented events. Until the advent of fascism, the state viewed national festivals-the grist of European tradition mills-somewhat skeptically. In an only slightly veiled criticism of the fascist spectacle state, Croce reBolton King and Thomas Okey, Italy To-Day (London: James Nisbet, 1904), 233. Migliorini and Griffith, Italian Language, 404-5; Mabel Berezin, "Cultural Form and Political Meaning: State-Subsidized Theater, Ideology, and the Language of Style in Fascist Italy," American Journal of Sociology 99 (March 1994), 1256-59. 28 Jiirgen Habermas is the principal proponent of this argument. See The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989 ). For the research directions Habermas's argument has taken, see Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 199 3). 29 See Gabriella Klein, La politica linguistica del fascismo (Bologna: II Mulino, 1986), 34· 30 Antonio Gramsci, "Oratory, Conversation, Culture," in Antonio Gramsci: Selections from the Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geof!i-ey Noweii-Smith, trans. William Boelhower (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 382. 31 The historical literature on premodern festival in Italy is vast. For suggestive accounts, see essays in Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 26

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counted the national reluctance to commemorate the taking of Rome from the French in 1870. He noted that the London Times had derided the "Italian love of celebrations and festivities" and had referred to Italy as "the nation of carnivals." Invoking the Times article, Croce argued that "a free country should beware of following the customs of despotic governments, which must needs distract the minds of their subjects with festivities, in order to prevent them from dwelling on their own grievances, or bewailing their lost liberty. m 2 The long-forgotten English criticism had little effect on the fascist ritual state; the post-unification state, however, with the exception of an annual pilgrimage to the tomb of Vittorio Emanuele, had avoided developing an extensive battery of national festivals. 33 The Italian education system not only failed to disseminate the language and create the sense of patriotism that was the province of other European education systems but also exacerbated cultural tensions and class dissatisfaction. In 1922, Italy was a country with an urban industrial north, a vociferous working class, an illiterate and underdeveloped peasant south, and a quasi-educated and economically disadvantaged middle class. 34 Culture, and access to culture, was rigidly stratified. Italian high culture, from art to literature, and its political manifestations, from nationalism to avant-gardism, was the property of a small elite. The one apparently democratic door to culture and status, a professional degree, was for the most part a dead end. King and Okey describe the situation in 1902: "Men, who in England would go into business ... and be trained for it, here [Italy] swell the ranks of the educated unemployed. . . . Every successful tradesmen hopes to see his son a lawyer or doctor or civil servant and spends L.3oo to L. 500 in Croce, History of Italy, 82-83. See Bruno Tobia, Una patria per gli italiani (Rome: Laterza, 1991), esp. 100-II3, for a discussion of tbe weak Italian foray into tbe invention of national traditions. In an impressionistic but still useful study, Herbert W. Schneider, Making the Fascist State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928), supports this contention: "The Italian state is hopelessly bare and empty. Being of recent date, headed by a half French royal house and conducted by a very prosaic Parliament, having only occasional military celebrations and still more occasional visits of the King to make it impressive, represented continually by boyish policemen, petty officials and busy tax-collectors, it is comparatively quite remote and unattractive" (217). 34 The social history of Italy has yet to be written, and scholars tend to rely on King and Okey, Italy To-Day. Work on the Italian middle classes is emerging; see, for example, Berezin, "Created Constituencies," 142-63; Jonathan Morris, The Political Economy of Shopkeeping in Milan, r886-1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Marinecia Salvati, Il regime e gli impiegati: La nazionalizzazione piccolo-borghese nel ventennio fascista (Rome: Laterza, 1992) and L'inutile salotto: L'abitazione piccolo-borghese nell'Italia fascista (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993 ). In general, historians have neglected this area but have freely made generalizations about Italian social life and culture with little that would pass for evidence in other contexts. In sum, the effect of social variables such as language, civic culture, and social practice is largely unexplored. 32

33

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educating him for a useless life." 35 The crowding of the universities produced one of the largest groups of unemployed "intellectuals" in Europe, which left the socially aspiring petite bourgeoisie with a deep sense of cultural inferiority. 36 The popular Italian cultural idiom was a language of sentimentality and emotion. 37 The love affair was the standard plot that enframed Italian social imaginings. The characters in this Italian kitsch were frequently adulterous wives or mothers who as deserted wives had to deal with the problem of children. The Italian preoccupation with sentimentality went back to the early nineteenth century. Mass circulation novels focused on the "'irresistible' force of a blinding and compelling passion" and the "'regeneration' of [woman], fallen through the lure of the senses or through poverty, the 'regeneration' of [man] who has committed a crime, has been condemned by the law and [has] made expiation." 38 Juxtaposed against the language of sentimentality was the language of melodrama. Italian opera is suggestive of the underside of Italian sentimentality with its frequent focus on unruly passions and uncontrolled emotion. The Italian language of emotion became a part of the political vernacular of a fascist regime that wished its citizens literally to fall in love with it. 39 The language of sexuality and romance suffuses fascist prose. This language itself is frequently viewed as fascist, but it was a cultural resource on which the regime drew to construct its own political discourses. The language of sentiment and emotion spoke to the status-deprived petite bourgeoisie, which craved the cultural outpourings of the new regime and was a major constituency of fascist cultural policy .'0 Sources of the Italian Self: Transposing Schemata The style in which Italian nineteenth-century nation-state builders imagined Italy sharply diverged from the style in which Italian citizens constructed their identities. Noncontingent Italian identities tended to be private and tied to family, local and tied to place, and religious and tied to the King and Okey, Italy To-Day, 249. Marzio Barbagli, Educating for Unemployment (New York: Columbia University Press, I982), II9. 37 See Gramsci's essays on Italian mass literary culture in Selections from the Cultural Writings, 342-86. 38 Croce, History of Italy, 79· 39 For the relation of gender, nationalism, and the language of sexuality, see Katherine Verdery, "From Parent-State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe," East European Politics and Societies 8 (Spring I994), 225-55. 40 See Victoria De Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, I98I), I27-50. 35

36

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Catholic Church. The cultural communities of family, region, and religion provided the schemata that were the sources of the Italian self. The unification and the fascist project were attempts to supplant regional identities with national identities. Regionalism was, and is, a fact of Italian political and cultural life that no Italian regime has successfully overcome. The boundaries of family and religion were more permeable, more subject to transposition. The cultural architects of the fascist project, themselves bound to these schemata, played with them to transpose the rules of the Italian cultural game.

The Catholic Church as Institution The neutralization of its principal competitor for the moral center of the Italian citizen-the Catholic Church-was a necessary first step to the realization of the fascist regime's social and political agenda. The Catholic Church did not accept Italian unification in r86r and refused to recognize the new Italian state and its institutions. 41 In 1874, Pope Pius IX forbade Catholics to vote in national elections. The non expedit, as the pope's order became known, effectively barred Catholics from participation in Italian national civic life." 2 Although the rise of Catholic political parties at the turn of the nineteenth century suggests that Catholics did not observe the non expedit, it offered a powerful symbolic statement on the relations between church and state in Italy. The pope relaxed the non expedit in 1904 principally to encourage Catholics to vote against socialists. The battle between church and state was also fought on a terrain that the average Italian could not ignore: the institution of marriage. The Italian state did not recognize religious marriage ceremonies; the church did not recognize civil marriage. Marriage was a Roman Catholic sacrament. Ifltalian Catholics married in a civil ceremony without benefit of a religious ceremony, the Catholic Church denied them access to its rites. Conversely, if they married in a religious ceremony without benefit of a civil ceremony, spouses had no reciprocal legal marital rights and children who were born of these marriages were considered illegitimate. The opposition between civil and religious matrimonial law left Italian Catholics who wished to marry in the awkward position of having to go through two ceremonies. The conflict over matrimony brought the fissure between the church and state into the 41 On the origins of the conflict between church and state in Italy, see D[aniel] A. Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy (rpt., London: Oxford University Press, I970), 3~29; A[rturo] C[arlo] Jemolo, Church and State in Italy, IBso~I950, trans. David Moore (rpt., Philadelphia: Dulfour, I96I), 53~83; and King and Okey, Italy To-Day, 29~6o. 42 Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 59·

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everyday lives of the majority of Italians whether they were politically engaged or spiritually devout. 43 As early as r 9 2 5, the regime realized that if it was to have any authority in the "moral" sphere, it must resolve the "Roman question," the popular label for the Italian schism between church and state. On February II, 1929, the regime and the Catholic Church signed the Lateran Pact. The church agreed to recognize the Italian fascist state as the legitimate political authority in Italy and not to ban Catholics from participation in the state; the regime agreed that Catholicism was the state religion ofltaly. The "Conciliation," a political coup for the fascist regime, ended the seventy-year-old schism between church and state and paved the way for the Fascist Party to accelerate its infiltration of Catholic civic and voluntary organizations. Mussolini had succeeded with the Catholic Church where every other Italian statesman since Cavour had failed. 44

Roman Catholicism as Popular Culture In a frequently cited speech given in 1926, Mussolini described fascism as a new political religion. Noting that he had chosen the public piazza to articulate his ideas rather than the chambers of parliament, he proclaimed, "Fascism is not only a party, it is a regime, it is not only a regime, but a faith, it is not only a faith, but a religion that is conquering the laboring masses of the Italian people." 45 Scholars of the speech have tended to look for direct parallels between fascist and religious ritual practice, that is, to describe how fascism was similar to religion. 46 This, I argue, is a wrong turn, because it implies a static view of religion and fascism. Religion is not simply doctrine or rite: it is lived practice, and its symbols are reinforcing but not totalizing. Roman Catholicism as a religion comprised doctrine and institutions. The doctrine was functionally irrelevant to the popular practice of Roman Catholicism in a semiliterate country such as early-twentieth-century Italy, where a battery of cyclical liturgical rituals obliterated whatever nuances of church doctrine seeped into popular consciousness. The popular practices of Roman Catholicism, engraved in the mental frames of even the fascists, provided an opportunity for cultural transposition. The central paradox in the 43 See King and Okey, Italy To-Day, 257-58, and Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy, 388-406. 44 On the negotiations surrounding the Conciliation, see Jemolo, Church and State in Italy, 225-39. 45 Benito Mussolini, "Discorso di Pesaro," in Dall'attentato Zaniboni at discorso dell'ascensione, vol. 22 of Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, ed. Edoardo Susmel and Duilio Susmel (rpt., Florence: La Fenice, I956), I97· Opera Omnia is hereafter cited as 00. 46 See, for example, Gentile, Culto dellittorio, 3-38, 30I-I5.

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relation between the Catholic Church and Italian politics in general is that, despite the church's obvious power, there is a high degree of anti-Catholicism and anticlericalism in Italy. Yet Roman Catholicism was a form of popular culture, that is, everyone participated in Catholic practices that were independent of doctrine or belief and shaped Italian fascist and public consciousness. What literature exists on the Italian practice of Roman Catholicism suggests that belief is low, more form than substance, but that its ritual practices are readily adopted to serve political ends.'7 Although there was competition between the regime and the church, there was an affinity between fascism and Catholicism that the regime exploited. In contrast to Protestantism, Catholicism as religion does not acknowledge a private self. One is Catholic both inside and outside the church. Italian Catholics may not know or understand the theological reasoning behind the church's public positions, doctrinal decisions, or liturgy, but they understand that the Catholic Church does not recognize the separation of selves: to be Catholic is to be Catholic in the public and private sphere. This fundamental "rule" of Catholicism was not lost on Italian fascist ideologues. In a 1925 speech entitled "What Is Fascism?" Giovanni Gentile presented "his" fascism and argued that fascism is a "faith" whose multiplicity and open-endedness could attract numerous followers of diverse positions.48 Concluding on the note that "fascism is a religion," he draws an explicit connection between fascism and Catholicism as ethoses that do not separate the public and private self. One cannot be a fascist in politics and not fascist. . . in school, not fascist in one's family, not fascist in one's work. Like a Catholic, if one is Catholic, one invests his whole life with religious sentiment ... if one is truly Catholic, and has a religious sense, one remembers always in the highest part of one's mind, to work and think and pray and meditate and feel Catholic; so too a fascist, who goes to parliament, or to the fascist house, writes in the newspapers or reads them, follows his private life or converses with others, looks to his future or thinks of his past and the past of his people, ought always to think of himself as a fascist! 49 47 Most work on the popular practice of religion in Italy focuses on the premodern period. See especially Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (London: Routledge, 1981). Scholars have noted the parallels between fascist and Christian symbolic practice, but there has been no sustained analysis of this interaction. On the Italian Communist Party's manipulation of Catholic practice, see David I. Kertzer, Comrades and Christians (New York: Cambridge University Press, 198o), esp. 130-68. " "Che cosa e il fascismo?" in Giovanni Gentile: Politica e cultura, ed. Herve A. Cavallera, vol. 2 (Florence: Le Lettere, 1991), 86. 49 Ibid., 3 6.

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Making the Fascist Self

According to Gentile, the ethic of fascist religion was "hard work" and "sacrifice" with little time for "diversion," an ethic that was ideally suited to an economically underdeveloped country with a militant working class. This fascist transposition of the deep cultural ideal of Catholicism, the fusion of public and private self, would be recognizable to all Italians, whether they believed, practiced, or understood the text of Roman Catholicism. An example of the fascist transposition of a tangible cultural object was the form of fascist propaganda books. Beginning in 1923, with the Gentile reform of education, it became mandatory to teach the Catholic religion in the schools. The Roman Catholic catechism, with its question-and-answer format to be learned by rote, was a standard feature of Italian education and Catholic socialization that was difficult to escape. 50 What follows is an excerpt from the official catechism in popular use at the turn of the century. What is the Catholic Church? The Catholic Church is the society of the baptized that believe and profess the doctrine and the laws ofJesus Christ, participate in the sacraments that He instituted, recognizing His Vicar on earth the Roman Pontiff and obey him and other legitimate Pastors. Why is the Catholic Church the only true Church of Jesus Christ? The Catholic Church is the only true Church of Jesus Christ, because it is the only one founded by Him and it is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, which is as He wished. How is the Church one? The Church is one, because its members, in every time and in every place, have and had the same faith, the same sacraments and the same sacrifice, the same ties of charity and communion under the same visible head, the Roman Pontiff. 51 The similarities between the form of the catechism and the form of a fascist propaganda tract are striking: 50 On the history of the Italian catechism and its reform, see Luciano Nordera, Il catechismo di Pio X: Per una storia della catechesi in Italia (r8g6-rgr6) (Rome: LAS, I988); on the Gentile reform of education, see Tracy H. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy, I9ZZ-I943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, I985), 54-55. 51 A copy of a page of the catechism of Pius X appears in Nordera, II catechismo di Pio X, appendix I 5.

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What is the State? The State is the political and juridical organization of the National Society, and it exists in a series of institutions of various orders. But more precisely, according to Fascism, what is the State? According to Fascism the State is the supreme Authority that subordinates the activity and interests of single citizens to the general interests of the Nation. 52 Fascism and Catholicism were both in the business of indoctrination, and the form of the tracts would be recognizable to any Italian who had been to school, or before 1923, to church. As the regime did not aim to capture the minds ofltalian peasants, the form of the tracts proved a more potent vehicle of cultural transposition than any discursive messages they might have conveyed. 53

The Italian Family and the Cult of the Mother Inability to transcend parochial notions of interest has shaped Italian politics. The cultural strength of the Italian family and the local identities this attachment engendered served as a barrier to disinterested democratic practice. 54 The fascist regime, like the regimes that preceded and succeeded it, needed to channel emotion away from this powerful source of the Italian private self and project it onto the nation. A school text reminds youth that according to Mazzini, "the first cell of the organism of the Patria is composed of the Family. " 55 The fascist strategy to develop a cult of the mother that appropriated a visceral Italian feeling about the nature of motherhood did not need Mazzini for inspiration. Indeed, Mazzini's rhetoric and the regime's strategy sprang from the same cultural well. Motherhood has deep La dottrina fascista, with a preface by S. E. Turati (Rome: Libreria del Littorio, n.d.), 39· 53 The best portraits of the regime's relation to the Italian peasantry are fictional. See, for example, Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine, and Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli. 54 The literature on the family has focused on the South. Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: Free Press, 1958), generated a series of studies on this topic. In general, the effect of the family on Italian political practice has been neglected. Paul Gins borg's recent work on postwar Italy seeks to reverse that trend (A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, I943-r988 [Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1990 ]). 55 Biloni, Cultura fascista, 24 3. 52

II,

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cultural meaning in Italy, and the idea that motherhood is woman's most valuable role crosses class and educational boundaries. 56 The argument for the cultural meaning of Italian motherhood can be made indirectly. David Kertzer's work on infant abandonment provides an inverse view of the meaning of motherhood. 57 Italy had one of the highest rates of infant abandonment in Latin Europe. Italy was an honor society, and honor is directly connected to the idea of shame. An Italian man's honor was tied to the sexual purity of his wife, sisters, and daughters. An unwed mother brought dishonor on the family. The legal system overlooked crimes in the name of family honor. The Rocco Code of penal law passed in 1930 continued the nineteenth-century tradition of defining murder in the service of family honor as an "extenuating circumstance" and extended the definition of "extenuating" to include "learning" of a family member's act of sexual impropriety. Previously, the dishonored person (a wife had rights here also) had to witness the "illicit relationship. " 58 Although a woman's father or brother could murder to restore family honor, women were not terribly well protected in the system. Rates of unwed pregnancy in Italy were high. Unmarried pregnant women were regularly forcibly locked away to await the birth of their children and were frequently disowned. A woman had little recourse if the father of her unborn child was already married, as his family had to be protected at all costs. The church supported these practices in the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth century by running orphanages, foundling homes, and shelters for unwed mothers. In the late nineteenth century, as women entered the Italian labor force in great numbers, social reformers employed the "image of the evil mother" to legitimate their demands for protective labor legislation. 59 Kertzer's story focuses on the nineteenth century but its cultural meaning held sway in the twentieth. In general, Italian culture viewed women's sexuality as dangerous, a potential source of dishonor, if not disciplined in the role of mother. According to a fascist school textbook, an Italian woman refused adornments that would court sexual attention: "The true Italian woman is not a slave to fashion, particularly beyond the Alps [a criticism of France]; she dresses modestly, refuses every affectation, and to conserve her 56 The fact that no specific research supports my claim is perhaps sufficient evidence for making it. The importance of motherhood is such a taken-for-granted feature ofltalian "local knowledge" that it has never occurred to anyone to study it. 57 David I. Kertzer, Sacrificed for Honor (Boston: Beacon, 1993). 58 The Rocco Code was in effect until 1981. On Italian law as it pertains to the concept of honor, see Eva Cantarella, "Homicides of Honor: The Development ofltalian Adultery Law over Two Millennia," in The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present, ed. David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), esp. 242-44. 59 Kertzer, SacriftcedforHonor, 13, 26, 66,174.

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innate elegance knows 'to come from the mirror, without a painted face."' 60 In the 1920s and 1930s, the height of fascist "modernization," a young couple engaged to be married was always chaperoned. 61 The cultural belief in a female sexuality in need of strict discipline manifested itself in the popular predilection for melodrama and sentiment and had social roots in the organization of the Italian family. Once a woman became a mother, she assumed absolute control over a family. The pattern of female domestic authority was observable across class and region. Married couples frequently lived in extended households, where mothers-in-law made the decisions and allocated the family resources. According to survey data on women born between r89o and I9IO, mothersin-law ran the house in the majority of worker and peasant households. Husbands and wives shared jointly in household decisions in the relatively small proportion of professional middle-class households. A similar pattern holds for the allocation of family resources. 62 These data, though limited, suggest that mothers had a form of cultural power that was far and above what one would expect-especially given the fact that in peasant and worker households the women often consumed their dinner in the kitchen while the men sat at the table. The story of the "invisibility" of the dead spinster in Chapter 6 underscores the deeply held belief that women not only discipline their sexuality in motherhood but obtain their social visibility through this role. Mothers and motherhood became a linchpin of contradictory fascist social policies that directed women to be fertile and to reproduce as well as to be "modern" and to work. The fascists played out these contradictory ideas in public rituals where the living body of the mother served as cultural and political icon. Mothers of the war wounded and fascist dead were regularly paraded in public space and juxtaposed against the figures of the young girls and women who were part of fascist youth organizations and participated in sporting and gymnastic events. The strong future of the mother and the existing mothers were ritual emblems of the past and future production of Italian fascist bodies. Quoting Mazzini, a fascist text suggests the powerful influence of the sentimentalized mother: The angel of the family is the Woman. Mother, wife, sister, the Woman is the caress of life .... They are in themselves treasures of sweet consolation Biloni, Cultura Jascista, 246-4 7. Victoria De Grazia discusses courtship patterns and the control of women's sexual behavior as a struggle between "tradition" and the "lures" of commercial culture (How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, I9ZZ-I945 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992], 128-40, 201-33). 62 Marzio Barbagli, Sotto lo stesso tetto (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984) 429, 430. 60 61

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Making the Fascist Self

that numb every sorrow. And they introduce each one of us to the future. The first maternal kiss teaches the baby to love. The first holy kiss of friendship teaches man hope, faith in life: and love and faith create the desire to do better, the power to achieve step by step, the future of which the baby is the living symbol. ... For her, the Family, with its divine mystery of reproduction, reaches toward eternity. 63

Creating the Fascist Self: New Rules of the Cultural Game Fascism did not simply attempt to transpose the readily available cultural schema. It also sought to create new rules of the cultural game, new forms of noncontingent identities. In this task, it was on much more slippery terrain. The regime wished to construct fascist identities based on new conceptions of citizenship, nation, and community. In contrast to church and family, the bedrock of noncontingent Italian identities, these abstract political concepts had little cultural resonance. Whereas the focus of transposing the traditional sources ofltalian identity was on community, the cultural trigger for the new identity was the identification of enemies as embodied in liberalism and Marxism. Official fascist narratives defined fascism against "others"enemies and emphasized an ethic of living rather than codified doctrine. In attempting to codifY fascist ideology, scholars have either criticized it for incoherence or focused on discursive elements of fascist argument. 64 But fascism had only a few central ideas that it repeated in mantra fashion in newspapers, school texts, propaganda tracts, and a scattering of official documents. And those key ideas related to how one should live a fascist life. Their specific content was highly contingent on external and internal political exigencies that occurred over the twenty-one-year period of the regime. In short, fascism was about creating a new self in the state, and certain documents highlight its normative dimensions. Mussolini's essay The Doctrine of Fascism, written by Giovanni Gentile for the Italian Encyclopedia, is one such document. Gentile's speech "What Is Fascism?" as well as the 1927 Labor Charter and Mussolini's Ascension Day speech in the same year also articulate the dimensions of the new fascist self and argue for the merging of the public and private self in the state. 65 Biloni, Cultura fascista, 246. See, for example, Adrian Lyttelton, Italian Fascism from Pareto to Gentile (New York: Harper and Row, I973), and Pier Giorgio Zunino, Videologia del fascismo (Bologna: II Mulino, I985). 65 Corporativism, the policy outcome of the Labor Charter, is usually viewed as an economic policy; see Charles Maier, "The Economics of Fascism and Nazism," in In Search of Stability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I987), 70-I2o. I have argued in "Cre63

64

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57

In 1925, Giovanni Gentile presented "his" fascism and argued that the "unity" of fascism resulted from the "multiplicity" of "psychologies and systems of culture and conceptions of life" it incorporated: "The force of fascism derives from these linked needs and spiritual energies. And fascism would desiccate and become arid in the mechanical monotony of empty formulas if they could define it and restrain it in articles of a determined creed. " 66 Gentile rewrote Italian history to repudiate the aridity of the liberal era. There were "two Italys": the Italy of the Renaissance, which Gentile identified as the seat of European modernity, and the Italy of the Roman Empire. Glory went to Rome; history belonged to the Renaissance. Gentile viewed the salience of the Renaissance in Western civilization as casting a long "shadow" over Italian political and cultural development. The importance of the Renaissance was a double-edged sword because it ushered in the "age of individualism" (foreshadowing Jacob Burckhardt), which led to "decadence," "frivolity," and a lack of interest in family and state. The Renaissance produced "culture," but it was "dead, infertile." The legacy of rampant individualism remained, and "even today there are too many people in Italy who believe in nothing, laugh at everything, and long for Arcadia and other academies; and become hostile toward anyone who might disturb their digestion. " 67 Skipping over the next two hundred years of history, Gentile locates the true spirit of the Italian nation in Giuseppe Mazzini's version of nationalism and suggests that the forces that created the Italian state in r86o betrayed the spirit of nation to decadent liberalism. Bourgeois individualism is an illusion: "The particular individual is a product of imagination, mediated; each one of us is represented himself as one among many, in the crowd, circumscribed by the extreme limits of birth and death and in the brief confines of his physical person." 68 True liberty is located not in the individual but in the collectivity as represented by the state or the nation. Fascism made no distinction between the state and the nation, borrowing Mazzini's notion that the nation was an ever shifting "moral reality." Following Mazzini, Gentile argued that Young Italy is "fascism today": "The nation yes, truly, is not geography and is not history: it is program and mission." 69 Calling for a return to the Risorgimento of Mazzini, Gentile digressed on ated Constituencies" and elsewhere that it is also a cultural policy. The centrality Zeev Sternhell (The Birth of Fascist Ideology, trans. David Maisel [Princeton: Princeton University Press, I994]) ascribes to labor supports my contention. 66 "Che cosa e il fascismo?" 8. 67 Ibid., I4· 68 Ibid., 23. 69 Ibid., 25.

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fascist violence, which he dismissed as an offshoot of the "revolutionary" character of fascism. "What Is Fascism?" narrated Italian history in terms of a return to the religious character of Mazzini's nationalism. The Doctrine of Fascism, a directed critique of liberalism and Marxism, offered a clearer view of the new Italian community. Prepared for the 1932 edition of the Enciclopedia italiana and listed under the heading "Fascism," the Doctrine was ostensibly written by Mussolini. Actually, Mussolini wrote only the last half, and Gentile wrote the section entitled "Fundamental Ideas. mo The work was a propagandist document published separately from the Enciclopedia and in foreign translation. It argued that fascism was a "general attitude toward life" founded on "spiritual" ideas. Fascism was an "ethic" and a "moral" system: "The Fascist conception of life is a religious one in which man is viewed in his permanent relation to a higher law, endowed with an objective will transcending the individual and raising him to conscious membership in a spiritual society. " 71 Fascism, following Mazzini, collapsed the nation and the state. Nation is a "quality," not a "quantity," which is displayed when disparate groups realize themselves as a "single conscience" and "single will." In contrast to liberal ideals that posit the nation and then the state, it is the "State which forms the Nation, by lending strength and power and real life to a people conscious of its own moral unity. 'm Because of its spiritual nature the fascist state could not respect the bounds of public and private: The Fascist State, as a higher and more powerful expression of personality, is a force, but a spiritual one. It sums up all the manifestations in the intellectual and moral life of man. Its functions cannot therefore be limited to that of enforcing law and order, as the Liberal doctrine would have it. It is no mere mechanical device for defining the sphere within which the individual may duly exercise his supposed rights. The Fascist State is an inwardly accepted standard and a rule of conduct, a discipline of the whole person; it permeates the will no less than the intellect. It stands for a principle which becomes the central motive of man as a member of civilized society, sinking deep down into his personality: it dwells in the heart of the man of action and of the thinker, of the artist and of the man of science: soul of the soul. 73 A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism (New York: Free Press, 1969 ), 206. Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism, 4th ed. (Rome: Novissima, n.d.), 1o-n, 13. The citations are from the English eclition. 72 Ibid., 16-17. 73 Ibid., 19. 70

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Liberalism, because of its commitment to individualism, destroyed rather than enhanced liberty: Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of living men and not that of abstract dummies invented by individualistic Liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. 74 Liberalism bred democracy, which was a "kingless Regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical and destructive than a single one, even if he is a tyrant. " 75 Liberalism was a political illusion of the early nineteenth century which was incapable of dealing with the political realities of the twentieth. The Doctrine argued that all the great political experiments of the twentieth century, including the fascist regime, were "anti-Liberal." In the twentieth century, the "collective century," the "century of the State," liberalism's commitment to individualism was outmoded. Despite its espousal of "collectivity," the Doctrine was as harsh in its assessment of Karl Marx, who "would explain the history of mankind in terms of the class struggle and of changes in the processes of production, to the exclusion of all else," as it was in its assessment of Adam Smith. 76 Fascism redefined citizenship, the relationship between the individual and the nation, in terms of duties and not rights. The relations of production, central to Marxism, became central to the fascist conception of citizenship and belonging; but whereas in Marxism relations of production were an arena of struggle, in fascism they were loci of cohesion. Work, usually regulated by the private sphere of the market, under fascism destroyed the boundary between the public and private as workers submerged themselves in the national collectivity. The Labor Charter (Carta del lavoro ), a thirtypoint document written in a series of aphorisms by Giuseppe Bottai and Augusto Turati, defined the proper relation between the individual and the state and was a central statement of the fascist conception of the self that made explicit the contrast between fascism and socialism. 77 The Labor Charter was also a fascist co-optation of the church's official position on labor. On March 15, r89r, Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical entitled "The ConIbid., I 5. Ibid., 3 r. " Ibid. 77 The text of the charter is found in Giuseppe Bottai and Augusto Turati, La carta del lavoro (Rome: Diritto del Lavoro, 1929 ). 74 75

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Making the Fascist Self

clition of the Working Classes." Rerum Novarum argued that the state should help workers as an antidote to socialism and condemned unbridled capitalism. The encyclical was widely hailed as the Magna Carta oflabour. It called for Christian trade unions and mixed corporations of employers and employees that foreshadowed the fascist corporative state. 78 In his speech to the Fascist Grand Council on January 6, I927, Giuseppe Bottai introduced the Labor Charter as "more than a legislative document" and a "new way for everyone to be part of the national society." The Labor Charter was a declaration of "solidarity of all citizens before national interests. " 79 It advocated "progressive" labor reforms and included stipulations about holidays, limited work hours, benefits, sick days, and adjudication of labor disputes. According to Bottai, the Labor Charter was a "document without precedent in constitutional history," because it used the labor process to solidifY the bonding between the worker and the state. Fascism was superior to socialism because it included white-collar workers as well as industrial laborers: "The problems of the most humble workers, the interests of the salaried clerks and of manual laborers, exist on the same plane as the interests of business. " 80 The Charter laid the ideological groundwork for the corporative organizational structure that was not firmly in place until the I930s. 81 Work was the productive and social activity that linked the individual to the state. In a direct borrowing from Rerum Novarum, corporations, fascist unions that encompassed the entire workforce, were the organizational vehicles that concretized the state-individual relation. The Charter began with a biological metaphor asserting that the state was a social body: "The Italian Nation is an organism having ends, life, superior methods of power and endurance than those of the divided and regrouped individuals which compose it. It is a moral, political, and economic unity which realizes itself integrally in the fascist State." The Charter's second proposition followed logically from the idea that the nation was a moral collectivity. Economic production was national or "unitary," and all labor, including intellectual labor, was a "social duty." 82 If one accepted the unifYing nature of the state, then conflicts of interest between employers and employees were not possible. In a single rhetorical stroke, the Charter declared that socialism and its principal premise of "class conflict" was irrelevant. Class collaboration was the premise of fascism, and corporativism the 78 Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 230, and Gene Burns, The Frontiers of Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 40-42, make the point that Rerum Novarum's proposed reforms were based on neofeudalism. 79 Bottai and Turati, La carta, 26, 2 7. so Ibid., 3I. 81 On fascist union structure, see Domenico Preti, Economia e istituzioni nello stato fascista (Rome: Riuniti, 1980), 261-386. 82 Bottai and Turati, La carta, 3 5.

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ideological label attached to the principles the Charter espoused. Fascist syndicates replaced socialist unions. 83 All citizens, including employers, intellectuals, and professionals, were organized in "free" unions to which the state gave legal recognition."' The new fascist collective labor contract was the "concrete expression of solidarity among the various factors of production. " 85 The theory of fascist collectivity did not repudiate free markets. Proposition 7 declared: "The corporative State considers private initiative in the field of production the most effective and useful instrument in the interest of the Nation." This aspect of the Charter speaks to Sternhell's point that markets were compatible with fascism. Proposition 9 which asserted: "State intervention in economic production takes place only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient or whenever the political interests of the State are involved. Such intervention can assume the form of control, encouragement, and direct management," evoking John Maynard Keynes in black shirt. 86 A month after the Labor Charter was introduced, Mussolini delivered a speech to the Chamber of Deputies in Rome which outlined the fascist conception of the polity and the role of the individual within it. Never bypassing a symbolic opportunity, particularly one that undercut the ritual space of the Catholic Church, Mussolini delivered "The Speech of the Ascension" on May 26, 1927-the Catholic feast day of the Ascension. 87 According to Roman Catholic liturgy, Christ ascended into heaven and completed the mission of establishing his kingdom on earth forty days after Easter. Mussolini's speech, a major policy address on the state of the Italian nation, celebrated the Ascension of the fascist regime; its temporal location on a significant Catholic feast day invoked, co-opted, and secularized resurrection imagery. The Speech of the Ascension focused on another dimension of the Italian private self: the family and its relationship with the state. The speech had three parts: the first addressed the demographic situation of the country, the second was a meditation on the use of violence and surveillance, and the last was an attempt to set fascism apart from other political ideologies. Mussolini argued that in a "well-ordered State" the "physical health of the people should take first place." 88 This emphasis on the health of the nation turned into a discourse on the declining Italian birth rate and an argument for a 83 Socialist unions were not outlawed but were left with no power. See Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, chap. 12, esp. 319, 322-24. 84 On the relationship between the individual and the labor contract, see Preti, Economia e istituzioni, 125-78. 85 Bottai and Turati, La carta, 3 6. 86 Ibid., 37, 38. 87 Benito Mussolini, "II discorso dell'ascensione," in Dall'attentato Zaniboni al discorso dell'ascensione, vol. 22, 00, 3 60-90. 88 Ibid., 36r.

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demographic policy that encouraged fertility and supported families. 89 As a policy remedy, Mussolini announced the foundation of the National Organization for the Protection of Mothers and Infants (Opera Nazionale per la Protezione della Maternita e dell'Infanzia). Turning from maternity to the issue of consent to the regime, Mussolini argued that the fascist state of the future would not need to resort to violence, police, or censorship to establish political commitment. The moral dimension of the new fascist state obviated the necessity of institutional agents of social control. Mussolini exhorted the Chamber: We ought to preoccupy ourselves with the moral order, not the public order, because in the public order, in the sense of policing words, we have sufficient forces; we ought instead to preoccupy ourselves in the moral order and we ought to wish, working to the utmost, that the connection between the masses and the regime will be always wide reaching, always more attached, always more conscious. (Applause)

As an ideology, fascism was "anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-socialist, and anti-Masonic. (Applause)" 90 It rejected the principal premise of liberal democracy-the popular franchise. Mussolini argued that the majority of citizens in liberal democracies did not exercise their right to vote and that voting actually militated against creating an involved citizenry. Voting gave an illusion of participation that fostered indifference. Corporative organization, groups of citizens that originated in their productive activity with the state at the apex, was an alternative to democratic participation and to socialist communalism that included all citizens in the polity. Thus, the fascist state was a social, not a political, entity. I do not think anyone in the twentieth century is able to live outside the State, if they are not a barbarian state, or savage state. It is only the State that gives people a consciousness of itself. If the people are not organized, if the people are not a State, they are simply a population that will be at the mercy of the first group of internal adventurers or external invaders. Because, oh gentlemen, only the State with its juridical organization, with its military force, always prepared, can defend the national collectivity; but if the human collectivity is fractionated and reduced 89 On family policy under the regime, see DeGrazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, 41-59; on the problems ofltalian fertility and fear of population decline, see David G. Horn, "Con· structing the Sterile City: Pronatalism and Social Sciences in Inter-War Italy," American Ethnologist r8 (August 1991), 581-6or. 90 Mussolini, "Discorso dell'ascensione," 3 82, 3 86.

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to only the nuclear family, a few Normans will be enough to conquer Apulia. (ApplauseY' Rituals and Resources A central paradox of Italian political and cultural development was that the strength of the state was inversely proportional to the weakness ofltalian national identity. Italy spent the post-unification period building the state, and by 1922, a labyrinthine structure of bureaucratic offices was in place. The fascist regime, the group of political actors who commanded the state and determined Italian political context until 1943, inherited an unwieldy and slow-moving public bureaucracy. 92 The reconstruction of the Italian state, a major portion of the fascist political project and one that lasted well after the fall of the regime, was an ongoing task. 93 The Italian state was a source of social mobility for large segments of the overeducated and underemployed Italian population. 94 This cadre of potential state employees provided the fascist regime with a human resource it could mobilize to coordinate its ever-expanding propaganda activities, from ritual to art. 95 The state as a formal bureaucratic mechanism orchestrated the fascist cultural project, including the production of public spectacle. The state was enlisted by the regime to rewrite the rules of the cultural game. The principal institutional resources the regime brought to bear on the creation of public spectacle were the legal system and the institutionalization of the Fascist Party. Law regulated public holidays, and the regime redesigned the legal holiday calendar literally to make time for fascist spectacle. Diverse government ministries were responsible for public events. The regime had the police, the Ministry of the Interior, the army, and the National Treasury Ibid., 3 89. I draw a distinction between the terms "state" and "regime." Scholars debate as to whether one can speak of a fascist regime before the I930S. From March I929, the year of the plebiscite, Mussolini and the Fascist Party were in complete control of the Italian state. This was a formal event, however, and Mussolini and the party were de facto in control of the state from I922. Adrian Lyttelton marks the beginning of the dictatorship, or "second wave" of fascism, as coincident with the speech Mussolini gave on January 3, I925, in which he responded to the murder of socialist deputy Matteotti. See "Fascism in Italy: The Second Wave," Journal of Contemporary History I (I966), 75-Ioo. 93 See Alberto Aquarone, Uorganizzazione della stato totalitario (rpt., Turin: Einaudi, I974), and Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il Duce: Gli anni del consenso, I9Z9-I936, vol. I (Turin: Einaudi, I974), I27-322. 94 The farther south one went in Italy, the more citizens distrusted the state and the more they depended on it for career advancement. See Berezin, "Created Constituencies," I 5758. 95 See Mabel Berezin, "Organization of Political Ideology: Culture, State, and Theater in Fascist Italy," American Sociological Review 56 (I99I), 643, 647. 91

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(public spectacle was expensive) under its jurisdiction and could commandeer public space whenever it chose. Public spectacle was a primary concern of the Ministries of the Interior and Public Security because their respective purposes were to monitor subversive activity and maintain public order. The Ministry ofWar coordinated veterans' groups when spectacle required them. Frequently, Mussolini himself became involved in the planning of ritual events. The Fascist Party mediated among the various state agencies and ministries that staged fascist spectacle and was in charge of the mundane aspects of coordination. Outside the Roman center, the organizational capacities of the local federal secretaries were crucial to the activities of fascist ritual. The production of ritual in fascist Italy ran in parallel with the development and ever expanding bureaucratic structure of the National Fascist Party. The party that developed in the years between 1922 and the late 1930s bore little resemblance to the rag-tag collection of artists, intellectuals, shopkeepers, and general ruffians who made up the early squadristi (squads) and arditi. 96 In the late 1920s, Mussolini declared that the party was an arm of the state at his disposal. The party was an organization that ran in parallel with the state, and competition emerged between national party leaders and high-ranking government ministers as to who was actually in control. Mussolini was technically head of both the party and the state. During the course of the regime, the party went through a number of reorganizations and its statute was revised several times. In 1926, the National Fascist Party began to publish the Folgio d)Ordini, a news sheet that listed party events. 97 The party standardized the plans and _schedules of ritual activities and published detailed reports that included the prescribed roster of activities in major cities, the names of party dignitaries who delivered Mussolini's message at various commemorations, detailed maps of parade routes, train schedules, and names and numbers of fascist squadrons imported for particular commemorations. In 1932, the Foglio began to publish a yearly calendar of party activities. For example, the 193 5 calendar listed the inauguration of a new train station in Florence, the opening of the City University in Rome, the annual report of the prefects, and the opening of a fashion exhibit in Turin. 98 Augusto Turati and Achille Starace were the national party secretaries who placed their stamp on this period. Turati was by all accounts somewhat 96 There is no history to date of the Fascist Party in the post·1922 period. Emilio Gentile's Storia del partito fascista (Rome: Laterza, 1989) concludes in 1922. I rely on Aquarone, Vorganizzazione della stato totalitario, and what can be pieced together from the Foglio d)Ordini. 97 A more elaborate version of this information is in the Atti del Partito Nazionale Fascista. 98 PNF, Foglio d)Ordini, Rome #140, 22 August 1935.

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dour and intensely serious. 99 Starace was an "intransigent" fascist who regretted the opening of the party to a broader membership in the 1930s. Scholars frequently attribute the increased militarization of the party and its emphasis on public ritual to Starace, who had the longest tenure as party head and who, as Mack Smith has noted, is commonly credited with putting all of Italy in uniform. 100 Starace assumed the role of national secretary of the Fascist Party in December 1931 and stepped down in October 1939. Looking to Nazi Germany as a model, he came up with some of the more flamboyant fascist symbolic actions, such as the Roman salute and the cult of the Duce. At some point in the 1930s even Mussolini complained that Starace's penchant for excessive "fascistifizing" was making him appear foolish. 101 Giuseppe Bottai, coauthor of the Labor Charter, occupant of many posts within the upper echelons of the state ministries, and an architect of fascist cultural policy, noted in his diary that Starace was ultimately dismissed because he had permitted the party to become obsessed with style at the expense of a spirit of "dynamic association." 102 But to ascribe the proliferation of fascist public spectacle to the fanaticism of Starace is to attenuate the extent to which it was part of the fabric of the fascist cultural project. Unlike Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, Italy had no single bureau of spectacle or government subcommittee of ritual events. Starace notwithstanding, fascist spectacle sprang from a general agreement among fascist elites, including Mussolini, that the state needed to theatricalize everyday life. Although patterns of ritual action clearly existed, much of the Italian spectacle was in a continual state of improvisation-commedia dell'arte as opposed to high theater. As in all improvisation, its content played with the available cultural schemata, but its timing frequently reacted to national policy priorities and international exigencies. The symbolic requisites of fascist youth organizations generated a portion of fascist public spectacles, principally sporting events; fascist appropriations of preexisting holidays engendered other spectacle events; and ritual surrounding the annual commemoration of the March on Rome was due to regime fabrication. Many public events were held in response to specific regime policy initiatives. Demographic policy elevated Mother's Day to an occasion of public ceremony, for example, and the war in Ethiopia and the journeys of Mussolini prompted a series of local and national public ritual events. 99 The best available account of the career of Turati appears in Alice Kelikian, Town and Country under Fascism: The Transformation of Brescia, I9I5-I9Z6 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 127-206. 100 Mack Smith, Mussolini, 203-5. 101 On Starace and his propagandist activities, see Guido Nozzoli, I ras del regime (Milan: Bompiani, 1972), 8 5-102. 102 Vent'anni e un giorno (Rome: Garzanti, 1949 ), 146.

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The landscape ofltaly provided a natural resource for Italian public ritual. 103 The Italian cityscape was a stage that served as a political resource for the regime. Every Italian city has a central piazza and a central road leading to it from the train station. Rome, with its residues of Italian history dating from antiquity, was replete with cultural monuments and public spaces that served as backdrops for fascist ritual events. The geographical size of Italy also aided the proliferation of fascist ritual. The trains did more than run on time-they carried the bodies, the ritual actors, from one part of Italy to another, from one event to another. Trains are as central to the story of fascist political ritual as ideology; they were a necessary infrastructure for Italian public spectacle. The small distances between Italian cities made it possible to import fascist bodies within hours. The regime established "rules for ritual" that specified the order of parades, the protocols for wearing the fascist uniform, and the reception of Mussolini. These rules were variations of existing military and diplomatic protocols. An additional set of protocols developed around the ringing of bells, the illumination of public buildings, and the displaying of the flag. 104 In 1926, the regime began to develop a legal framework around public spectacle. Public manifestations were limited to "science, intellectualism, benevolence, sport, and commemorations of honor." 105 Religious functions and accidental gatherings of crowds were left under the Ministry of Public Security. All other events were relegated to the local prefects, who were to issue permits only for events that aggrandized the new Italian state. The Fascist Party exerted the greatest power on the local level, where it had a much more direct hand in the planning of ritual events. Prefects from every province in Italy were charged with establishing a local calendar of ritual activities and sending a monthly report to the president of the Council of Ministers. The December 1931 report from Bologna provides an example. 106 The prefect requested permission for eight events, including a soccer match, a visit of the bishop of the diocese, a convention of artisans, and an official funeral service in honor of Mussolini's brother Arnaldo. The regime expended a great deal of effort in revivifying traditional holi103 Scholars are beginning to turn their attention to the social and political uses of public space. See, for example, Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (London: Blackwell, 1984), and the essays in The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations, ed. John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan (Winchester, Mass.: Unwin Hyman, 1989), esp. Edward Muir and Ronald F. E. Weissman, "Social and Symbolic Places in Renaissance Venice and Florence," 81-103. 104 See Consuetudini di cerimoniale, ed. F. C. (Rome: Tipografico Luigi Proja, 1936). 105 Memo, 23 August 1926, Council of Ministers, "Disciplina e coordinamento delle pubbliche maanifestazioni," ACS, PCM 1926 1.3-5 (1.3.3· 1710 ). 106 R. Prefettura della Provincia di Bologna, Prospetto delle pubbliche manifestazioni autorizzate dal Prefetto durante il mese di 31 dicembre 1931-X, ACS, PCM1931-33, 339/348.

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days and fairs and putting a fascist stamp on them. The cultural residue of centuries left three categories of holidays that the regime had to incorporate or abolish: national and religious holidays that Italians had celebrated for years, longstanding religious festivals, and occasional events such as public funerals. Emulating the French Revolution, the fascist regime began its history in I922. Starting in I926, the fascist year as well as the standard datefor example, I930 A. VIII-appeared on all publications and official correspondence.107 The regime redesigned the official calendar of holidays four times between I923 and I940. 108 The struggle over the public holiday calendar predated fascism. From I9I3, the central state actively sought to standardize secular and religious holidays. The debates over what was in and what was out culminated in April I922-six months before Mussolini came to powerwhen the state officially sanctioned May I, the socialist labor day. Three months after assuming power, the fascists outlawed the socialist holiday and replaced it with April 2 I, the date of the Birth of Rome and the new fascist labor day. 109 The conflict between giving official sanction to May I or April 2I as labor day was relatively easy. for the regime to resolve by fiat. The regime was on much shakier terrain when it came into conflict with its principal competitor for ritual time, the Catholic Church. In theory, the holiday calendar could expand infinitely; the problem was that attendance at parades and ceremonies meant time off from work. The Catholic holidays also required time off from work to attend Mass. The issue of free time for public and religious celebration placed the regime in direct opposition to its own labor unions. It was difficult to justifY paying workers to attend fascist rituals. Yet if workers were not paid, it was unlikely that they would be enthusiastic about fascist holidays that denied them income in economically harsh times. 110 Time was not the only domain in which church and regime came into conflict over holiday space. The church was vociferously concerned with which holidays were celebrated and which were not. For example, beginning in I925, the church began to lobby to include the feast of Saint Joseph in the official holiday calendar. The church argued that Saint Joseph, the carpenter and reputed stepfather of Christ, was a worker who could serve as a model for the new corporativist Italian worker. On a less spiritual note, 107 Ezio Bonomi and Arnaldo Caro, Celebrazioni patriottiche fasciste religiose (Milan: Nuova Italia, n.d.). 108 ACS, PCM 1937-39 3·3·3/f. 15 58, sf. 8, "Pro-Memoria," summarizes the fascist legislation on holidays. 109 See "Comunicato per Stafani e per Ia stampa," ACS, PCM 1923 2-4-1/f. rr23. " 0 These debates played themselves out differently in the public and private sector. Productivity was not an issue in the public sector of state bureaucracy.

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Catholic Action's emissary reminded the regime that Catholics commanded votes and were "believing and practicing laborers" and that it might be useful to accommodate them. The church maintained that the civil and religious holiday calendar required coordination. The church won this round, as the 1929 Concordat included official state recognition of ten Catholic holidays, including the feast of Saint Joseph on March I 9 .m The commemoration of the "Statuto," celebrated annually on September 20, was also of concern to the church. The Statuto, an Italian national holiday, commemorated the day that Italian troops liberated Rome from the French and celebrated the consolidation ofltaly as a single geographical unit with Rome as its capital. The first "march on Rome" drove the pope into the Vatican and precipitated the "Roman question." In a letter dated August 28, 1930, written to Dina Grandi, the Minister of Foreign Affairs (the Concordat made the Vatican an independent political territory), the papal nuncio stated that the pope viewed "the celebration of the 2oth of September as an offense to the Holy See and as a consequence to Catholics of Italy and the world, and a bowing to the few more or less veiled anticlericals who still exist in Italy." 112 The nuncio held that the continued celebration of the holiday gave "displeasure" and "offense" to the Holy See, which viewed the events of 1870 as a "violation" of its rights. By September 30, a note to Mussolini on stationery from the president of the Council of Ministers revealed that the regime was considering the nuncio's request to eliminate the holiday. The memorandum argued that the regime ought to give official sanction to holidays on a "case by case" basis and noted that the commemoration of the Founding of the Fascists might be a suitable replacement for the Statuto. On December IO, 1930, a new law to regulate holidays was presented to the Chamber of Deputies. The law aimed "to standardize the celebration of dates that are already celebrated by tradition and custom, not only in the entire territory of the Kingdom, but everywhere groups of Italians wish to maintain living ties to the Patria and Fascism. " 113 February II, the official date of the Conciliation, replaced the celebration of the Statuto. The law articulated the new union of church and state to justifY its elimination of the Statuto, which it described as "divisive." The Conciliation was a more u 1 I draw my narrative from a letter written in I928 by the head ofltalian Catholic Action to Mussolini and the Ministry of Corporations (ACS, PCM I937-39 3·3-3/f. I558, sf. I-I), and the text of the Concordat, Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno D'Italia- n. I 30 (Straordinario) (ACS, PCM I937-39 3-3-3/f I558, sf. I-3)112 ACS, PCMI937-39 3·3-3/f. I558, sf. I-I. 113 Disegno di Legge, Modificazione dell'elenco delle feste nazionali, dei giorni festivi a tutti gli effetti civili e delle solennita civili, Presentata alia Presidenza il IO dicembre I930, Atti Parliamentari, Camera dei Deputati, N. 7I7·a., ACS, PCM I937-39 3·3·3/f. I 5 58, sf. I-I.

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appropriate holiday, because it was a "work of the highest spiritual and political importance and everlasting glory of two great intellects, Benito Mussolini and Pius XI, which sanctions a united national territory and consecrates a spiritual and moral unity, worthy of elevation to civil celebration, full of happy recognition on the part of the Holy See that Rome is the capital ofltaly!" The holiday calendar established in 1930 remained, for the most part, unchanged until 1941, when the war effort required a reduction in holidays. The thirteen officially acknowledged Catholic holidays, in addition to the recognition of every Sunday, suggested that the church had won. Closer inspection of the dates of civil and national holidays, however, reveals that many were chosen in close proximity to Catholic holidays, intensifYing rather than resolving the conflict between church and state, Catholicism and fascism, for ritual space and the Italian private self. Culture is context; history is trajectory. Italy in 1922 was a bloated bureaucracy with weak national traditions and an undereducated and quasi-literate population that defined its private self in terms of family, region, and a popular culture of Roman Catholicism. On this landscape, the regime embarked on a course of rewriting the rules of the cultural game. New corporativist men and women would define their fascist selves in labor-the labor of the market and the labor of biological reproduction-and submerge themselves in the state. Fascist public ritual dramatized in the public piazzas ofltaly the new political community and new Italian self. In order to transcend mere rhetorical formulations, fascism needed to appropriate family and religion and reinvent them in the service of the regime. The regime engaged the resources of the state, created a fascist party, and mobilized public space and civil law to reinvent and renarrate the Italian past and create a fascist future. Public political ritual dramatized the tension between past and present, history and culture. We now turn to an analysis of those rituals to examine how they attempted to create a new fascist and Italian nation-state-a new identity.

CHAPTER

3

Convergence and Commemoration: Reenacting the March on Rome

The Iconography of Emotion On the morning of October 29, 1923, the state suspended public and private enterprise in Bologna. Stores and businesses closed, public transportation stopped, and the ubiquitous, ever open Italian cafes did not serve customers. The "splendid" autumn sunlight merged with flags and banners that "throbbed" with excitement in the breeze. Commerce ceased in celebration of a new Italian public holiday, the first anniversary of the March on Rome.' A year or two earlier, violence and armed skirmishes had dominated the Bolognese landscape. The capital of Emilia-Romagna, a rich agricultural area in central Italy, Bologna was the seat of the oldest university in Europe and the strongest socialist movement in Italy. In Bologna, tradition and modernity met and engaged in bloody conflict. 2 Architecturally dominated by red terra-cotta roofs and red brick, Bologna was figuratively red as well. The association of the physical image of the city with socialist political activities was not lost on the fascist regime and the planners of the first anniversary commemorations. An emerging fascist mythology reconstructed the events of October 1922 that brought Benito Mussolini to power as prime minister and made Italian fascism a legitimate party within the Italian state in terms of a revolutionary march on the Italian II Resto del Carlino (Bologna), 24-30 October I923. See Anthony L. Cardoza, Agrarian Elites and Italian Fascism: The Province of Bologna, I9or-r926 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I982), and Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, I9I9-I929 (rpt., Princeton: Princeton University Press, I987), 57-6I; on the contingent nature of fascist violence, see Adrian Lyttelton, "Causa e caratteristiche della violenza fascista: Fattori costanti e fattori congiunturali," in Bologna r920: Le origini del fascismo, ed. Luciano Casali (Bologna: Cappelli, I982), 33-5 5. 1

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7r

capital. In 1922, the fascist squads bypassed Bologna on their route to Rome, yet in 1923, Bologna merited an entire day of celebratory activities owing to its role in fascism's overall march to power. On October 28, the day before the celebrations, an editorial on the first page of Il Resto del Carlino, the Bolognese daily newspaper, noted, "It is not without clear significance that tomorrow the President will inaugurate the Bolognese Fascist House [ Casa del Fascia]." Bolognese fascism had "struggl[ ed ]" against a "grotesque reformist subversion" that was "fatally romantic and voluntaristic" and had permeated "working class organization." With the fascist "conquest of power" and the emergence of the "new State," Bolognese fascists needed their own meeting place for "fraternization," "education," "conviviality," and "study." Fascists who were "first" in "action" would now "address their energies to tranquil works of reconstruction and above all to the education of the spirit. " 3 The Bologna celebrations dramatized that the fascists had taken over the city and were the first steps in the public "education of the spirit" that would create the new fascist political community. Il Resto del Carlino's accounts of the spectacle, written in the charged and emotive style that dominated Italian melodramatic prose, anthropomorphized Bologna. The city as well as the crowds waited "expectantly" for Mussolini, who was scheduled to arrive at nine-thirty on the morning of the celebration. The wait was "fervid" and "wrenchingly full of jubilation and enthusiasm." "Vain words" were inadequate to convey the "heat and rhythm of the grand manifestation." Few times in its history had Bologna demonstrated such "a superb and fascinating spectacle of vitality." The "anxious" city "dressed" itself in anticipation of Mussolini's arrival. Every corner, piazza, and road prepared "feverishly." Festoons of greenery and Italian flags were hung from all the balconies of the city. Even the shops that were closed on the day of the event took the opportunity to redesign their windows to demonstrate to passing foreigners that Italy was the land of "good taste and riches." Bologna would welcome Mussolini as an "apostle and conqueror," and he would "feel" in the "delirious greeting of the multitude" the "throbbing" and "maternal passion" rising from the "earth of his Emilia ... the profound heart of Italy. " 4 On the day of the ceremony, the local notables and throngs of fascist squads moved with "rigorous precision" to the train station to await Mus-

3 "Domani," It Resto del Carlino, 28 October 1923, I. The Case del Fascio were direct appropriations of the socialists' Case del Lavoro, Labor Houses, which were voluntary associations of workers. 4 "II primo saluto di Bologna a! Duce," It Resto del Carlino, 30 October 1923, I. Mus· solini was born in the commune of Predappio in the region of Emilia· Romagna.

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solini. 5 Citizens, watching from sidewalks, windows, and balconies, cheered as troops and flags passed. The "rigorous precision" was highly constructed given that the railroads carried fascist squads from other parts of Emilia to participate in the commemorative events and many had never been to Bologna. The main road to the train station, the Via Indipendenza, was not sufficiently large to hold the throngs, and the squads spilled over to neighboring streets. The citizenry strained to view the ceremonies from the sidelines of the parade route; the events themselves were restricted to ticket holders who usually were local fascists and their families. The city "dressed" the train station for the occasion with an exterior mural of the March on Rome and decorated the piazza in front of the station with flags, disks with fascist iconography, ornamental plants, and laurel wreaths. At nine-twenty-five, the presidential train arrived; the band played "Giovinezza," the fascist anthem; a guard of honor presented arms; and Mussolini, with an entourage of fascist generals and high-ranking Fascist Party members, stepped off the train. Roman salutes and "resounding applause" greeted Mussolini, and a five-year-old girl presented him with a bouquet of flowers. Mussolini left the station and began the march down the Via Indipendenza, which was "swarming with an anxious crowd." The fascist spectacle of commemoration began: "The imposing line-up of the Militia and the Syndacates offered an unforgettable spectacle. From the balconies an uninterrupted storm of flowers brought the gentle homage of the women of Bologna to the Duce." 6 It Resto del Carlino's accounts used the language of feeling to create an iconography of emotion: vivid mental pictorial images drawn from the repertoire of Italian cultural schemata. The editorial writers of It Resto del Carlino, a newspaper with distinctly fascist sympathies, wanted their readers to feel excitement and anticipation. Their purple prose evoked the charged language of standard Italian melodrama: the words "throbbing" and "delirious" appeared repeatedly. Antithetical images of women as mothers and mistresses dominated the text. The city assumed the feminine aspect of a woman waiting for a lover, a familiar and congenial image in Italian cultural discourse. The Emilian earth exuded "maternal passion." The language of sexuality evoked the dual and contradictory aspects of fascism and its cadres of supporters. The fascists were men of tradition who beat back the "subversive" socialists and defended the established order-they saved the mother and family; they were also virile, romantic men of action who conquered women and cities with the same elan. If we rewrite the newspaper narrative in stark analytic prose, a different story emerges. Bologna shut down until three-thirty in the afternoon, and 5 6

Ibid. "II prima saluto di Bologna a! Duce,"

I.

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the events were in the center. The organizers of the event denied the public access to all but the parade, limiting the viewing of the spectacle to residents of the apartments over the shops on the parade route. The majority of Bologna's citizens inhabited peripheral neighborhoods, and with public transportation halted, incentive would have been low to attend. In addition, the city was filled with troops that were imported from other parts of Italy for the occasion, and the normal response would have been to stay away. The women who participated were the mothers and widows of the "fallen for the revolution," and their appearances at these events were in exchange for their widows' and family pensions and not necessarily due to an outpouring of fascist emotion. Mistresses and lovers were kept out of sight. Il Resto del Carlino's narrative style was as much Italian as it was fascist. The iconography of emotion that colored journalistic accounts suggests the disjuncture between the language offeeling and the emotions that the commemorative events generated. My "rewriting" points to the tension between reportage and experience, discourse and action, representations of power and realities of power that any study of politics and culture must address. Il Resto del Carlino's narrative was as much a cultural fantasy as the March on Rome was a political fantasy. How likely was it that "delirious" crowds "palpitated" with emotion in anticipation of Mussolini's arrival and "breathlessly" participated in ritual events1 The subtext beneath the charged prose is revealing. The choice of Bologna as a site sent a clear message to its citizens as to who had won and who had lost in the battles between socialists and fascists only three years earlier. Conversely, the socialists did not go away, and there must have been subversive elements lurking in Bologna on that sunny October day. The first anniversary commemoration of the March on Rome was a starting point in the creation of the communities of feeling that aimed to generate solidarity with the regime. But in 1923, the fascist cultural project was in its infancy, and emotion, except among the most committed, was pure fabrication. The first anniversary events established the parameters of commemoration as a ritual genre. Focusing on the recent past, the re-creation of the March on Rome was among the first public and ritualized exercises in fascist history making. This chapter explores the design and performance of that commemoration and the repertoire of cultural practices and resources on which it drew. The Myth of the Founding Event Burckhardt described the Italian Renaissance state, the new modern state, as the "outcome of reflection and calculation, the State as work of art. m The nation-state that the fascist regime attempted to craft from the nineteenth7 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, vol. r (New York: Harper, 1958), 22.

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Making the Fascist Self

century Italian bourgeois state aimed at similar artistry. The changing social and ideological structures of fifteenth-century Italy provided the raw material of the Renaissance state, just as the Tuscan landscape provided the marble for Renaissance sculpture. But the fascist state had limited social material on which to draw, and it sought to capture the imagination of a population that in the main had no compelling economic or social reasons to acquiesce. The first "work of art" the fascist regime created was the reinvention of the events of October 27 and 28, 1922, as the "March on Rome." The fiction of the March, like all political myth, represented the tension between revolutionary aspiration and political possibility which the fascist movement confronted as it took over the reins of government. 8 Fascism conceived of itself as revolutionary, yet the fascist takeover of the Italian state did not meet the minimum requirements of a coup d'etat: a rapid seizure of the state by an outside group. 9 The king asked Benito Mussolini to become prime minister and to form a government. Technically, there was an orderly and legitimate transfer of power that Mussolini and his fascist squads embellished with the spectacle of the March. The single critical account of the first-anniversary commemorations in the major Italian newspapers came from La Stampa, the liberal Turinese paper, which framed its criticism in terms of the regime's confusion of myth and history. 10 La Stampa's critique centered on the fact that the regime constructed itself as having saved Italy from social "decomposition," a fascist code word for socialism. According to La Stampa, the threat of socialism ended in Italy in 1920, and what the fascists saved Italy from, if one could speak of salvation, was the chaos of the inefficient liberal regime. La Stampa argued, "To speak in 1921-22 of an Italy in decomposition, due to bolshevism, truly would suggest taking too much audacious license with history, or with one of its eyes, chronology." 11 Popular culture reinforced the image of pre-fascist Italy as a cauldron of socialist violence and chaos. Mario Carli's 1930 propagandist novel Mus' For an anthropological discussion of the political meaning of the myth of a founding revolutionary event, see Victor Turner, "Hidalgo: History as Social Drama," in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 98-155. 9 Whether or not the fascist regime effected social change is a question historians are beginning to confront as they acknowledge the continuities between the fascist period and the democratic state that followed. For a slightly ironic account that glosses over the issue of violence in the fascist "revolution," see Curzio Malaparte, Coup d'Etat: The Technique of Revolution, trans. Sylvia Saunders (New York: Dutton, 1932), 175-220. 10 "Mito e storia," La Stampa (Turin), 30 October 1923, 1. La Stampa's criticism of the regime was not surprising, as Turin was a center of Italian socialism. II Duce's reception in Turin, the day before the first anniversary commemorations began, was so cold that Mussolini canceled his appearance in Cremona on October 27. For a description of Mussolini's visit to Turin on October 25, 1923 and its place in the historical memory of the city, see Luisa Passerini, Torino operaia efascismo (Rome: Laterza, 1984), 228-33. 11 "Mito e storia," 1.

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solini)s Italian (Vitaliano di Mussolini) conjures up the image of Italy in chaos in its opening pages. Falco, the hero, welcomes his uncle back to Italy after an absence of several years. The uncle, who has been in America, muses that the Italy he left was a land of "strikes, disorder, acts of sabotage, crime."' 2 Falco agrees and argues that pre-fascist Italy could be defined as a "cradle of anarchy," where the trains either did not part, or, if they parted, one did not know if and when they would arrive at their destination; public services in the most distressing disorder did not function; strikes, with related closing of stores, were improvised every day; industries shut down; vagabonds and panhandlers were the norm on the streets; the piazza ruled the palace with blackmail and usurpation; the governments permitted all criminal experiments from the occupation of the factories to the assault on shops; numbers surpassed reason, demonstrating in practice how a communist regime would have betrayed the moral and intellectual values of the nation; from the breast of heroes they tore away war decorations, stepping on them as though they were signs of ignominy; they hit the mutilated, they sneered at the wounded, they provoked patriots with political innuendo. In four years, the situation has reversed itself: order, labor, discipline, Patria, sacrifice, duty: these are the living formulas. The State dominates the parts. In the fields and in the offices they produce singing. The right to strike and the class struggle have been relegated to the formulas of utopia.'' Until 1914, Mussolini himself had been a socialist and was part of the depravity that fascism reputedly deplored. He was the editor of the socialist newspaper VAvanti and supported its policy of neutrality in the war. In 1914, he suddenly changed his mind on the issue of intervention (a habit that characterized his political style), abruptly quit VAvanti, and founded his own newspaper, It Popolo d)Italia, financed by Milanese industrialists. Italy was torn by labor strife in the years following World War I, and there was a continuous turnover of prime ministers as different political factions attempted to rule the country. In this climate of instability, numerous extraparliamentary groups emerged. Among them were the Fighting Fascists (Fasci di Combattimento ), a group of nationalists, war veterans, futurists, and university students. Their desire to see Italy take its rightful place in the international order and a romantic 12 Mario Carli, VItaliano di Mussolini (Milan: Mondadori, 1930), 27. Carli was a futurist, squadrista, and regime publicist who wrote numerous works on the fascist ethos and style. See Vanna Gazzola Stacchini, "Mille eroi da leggenda," in I best seller del Ventennio: II regime e il libro di massa, ed. Gigliola De Donato and Vanna Gazzola Stacchini (Rome: Riuniti, 1991), 461-77, 481-85, 6?5-77· 13 VItaliano, 29-30.

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Making the Fascist Self

conception of action held this polyglot group together. The Fighting Fascists directed their public anger at the socialist policy of noninterventionism, to which they attributed the Italian defeat at the Battle of Caporetto. Mussolini recognized this agglomeration of malcontents as a free-floating political force to which he could provide leadership and organization. In I9I9, he founded the Fascist Party in Milan and assimilated the Fighting Fascists. Mussolini ran a Fascist Party slate for office in the same year, and it met a crushing defeat. He spent the years between I9I9 and I922 building his fledgling movement by encouraging its rowdier elements, the provincial war veterans, and waiting for the appropriate moment to acquire political power for himself. He used Il Popolo d 1Italia as a forum to express his views on national and international events and to keep fascist "intellectuals" out of the electoral arena, where they had proved in the I 9 I 9 election to be of little use. By the summer and fall of I922, labor unrest had come to a halt in Italy and the turnover of prime ministers was the most urgent national problem. Mussolini seized the moment to persuade the king to appoint him to the Council of Ministers and became part of the inner circle of rule. He began simultaneous negotiations with the king, the ousted liberal prime minister Giovanni Giolitti, and leaders of fascist squads. With the king and Giolitti, Mussolini discussed becoming part of the cabinet; with the fascist squad leaders, he discussed taking over the state. Historical accounts are vague as to the details of what happened during the four days in I922 between October 28 and October 3 r that brought Mussolini and fascism to power. 14 Historians have described the March as a "colossal bluff'' and a "campaign of psychological warfare." 15 The Italian government fell into crisis in October I922, and it appeared that there would be no government at all. Mussolini began acting on both fronts. He negotiated with the king and told the fascist generals to prepare to march; he told neither side that he was negotiating with the other. On the morning of October 2 7, when Prime Minister Luigi Facta's coalition government fell apart, Mussolini gave the order to prepare for a state takeover. The fascists seized the post offices, telegraph lines, and all communication mechanisms in the key Italian cities of Milan, Florence, Perugia, and Rome. No news circulated except the news Mussolini released. Fascist forces were relatively small and no match for the Italian army or the police, both of which were 14 Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, is the standard account in English; Renzo De Felice, Mussolini it fascista: I. La conquista del potere, rgzr-rgzs (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), provides a dated but still useful history in Italian. Other accounts are Gaetano Salvemini, The Origins of Fascism in Italy, ed. Roberto Vivarelli (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), and Roberto Vivarelli, Storia delle origini del fascismo: L'Italia dalla grande guerra alta marcia su Roma, vol. 2 (Bologna: II Mulino, 1991). " Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 85; Alexander DeGrand, Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Developments (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989 ), 3 6.

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loyal to the king. The fascists were in no position to seize much more than communication lines, but this proved sufficient. Mussolini announced, and it was reported in Il Popolo d)Italia, that he had three hundred thousand armed fascists at his command ready to march on Rome. In reality, there were fewer than thirty thousand. Sometime during the night of October 28, the king asked Mussolini to form a government. Facta resigned. Mussolini accepted the king's offer and began to prepare for the March on Rome. Mussolini obtained more than he had originally asked for, and all historical accounts agree that it was the king's decision that finally brought Mussolini to power, although no account is quite certain as to why the king decided as he did. He too may have been persuaded of the existence of the three hundred thousand fascists ready to march. The March on Rome gave the fascist regime its first photo opportunity: But the fascist leader [Mussolini] was not satisfied with something so unspectacular as a royal appointment. He needed to develop the myth of a march on Rome by 30o,ooo armed fascists to enforce an "ultimatum" he had given to the king .... His [Mussolini's] fascist squads did not arrive in Rome until twenty-four hours after he had been asked to form a government and only after General Pugliese had orders to let them through. But the photographers were waiting to picture their arrival and the myth was launched of fascism winning power by armed insurrection after a civil war and the loss of 3,ooo men. These fictitious 3,ooo "fascist martyrs" soon took their place in the government-sponsored history books.' 6 The mothers and the widows of the fictitious three thousand would be called on for the next twenty years to appear at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to commemorate the March. Mussolini took the night train from Milan to Rome and got off at a stop outside the city. He marched into Rome after a full night of sleep.

Fascist History Making The story of the March became grist for fascist propaganda mills. Eager provincial publicists wrote tracts such as "The Two Marches on Rome: Julius Caesar and Benito Mussolini." 17 The National Fascist Party manual, advertising itself as "accessible to all and containing what is indispensable to Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (London: Granada, r98r), 63-64. Tito Vezio, "Le due marce su Roma: Giulio Cesare e Benito Mussolini," Mussolinia r (1923): 5-14 .. 16 17

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Making the Fascist Self

know about our Revolution, the Party, the Regime, [and] Mussolini's state," published in catechism style the following questions and answers on the March. Question: How can one define the March on Rome? Answer: The March on Rome was a political revolt against central government forces that were incapable, and that let the authority of the State decline and threatened to stop Italy on the road to its greatest development. Question: What was the historical import of the fascist Revolution? Answer: The historical import of the fascist Revolution was to renew the Italian people, making them united, harmonious, disciplined for the greatness and imperial potency of the Patria. 18 In a pamphlet entitled What Every Young Laborer Ought to Know: Answers to 74 Questions, published by the Fascist Confederation of Industrial Laborers, workers learned that "socialism had become heedless of labor's interests" and that the "March on Rome" signaled the "conquest of power" when the king authorized Mussolini to "reconsecrate the victory" of Wodd War !.19 In addition to the numerous propaganda works directed toward an Italian audience, the regime supported the production of literature meant for international consumption, such as Mussolini's My Autobiography; Margherita Sarfatti's Dux, a biography of Mussolini; and Luigi Villari's The Awakening of Italy, which Gaetano Salvemini described as a "Fascist 'Vulgate,'" referring to the fourth-century edition of the Bible, the Latin Vulgate, aimed at the popular classes. 20 In his autobiography, Mussolini described his ascent to PNF, Il primo e secondo libro del fascista, preface, 29. "Cia che il giovane lavoratore deve sapere," 6-7 in ACS, PNF, MRF, 89.I51.3. 20 According to Salvemini (Origins of Fascism), The Awakening of Italy reached a large international audience, in part because of the Encyclopedia Britannica's role in its marketing. He notes: "To credit the Fascist regime with 'bringing order out of the Chaos,' all the journalists affiliated with Fascist propaganda described the postwar crisis in the most appalling colors. A book soon embodied the Fascist version, Signor Villari's Awakening of Italy. Signor Villari did not need to worry about, or waste time on, conscientious and tiresome research and documentation. He only needed as rapidly as possible to put on the market a book which might become a handy source of information for whoever wanted to form an idea ofltalian affairs, and Awakening of Italy, published at the beginning of r924, met such a need and constituted what might be called the Fascist 'Vulgate.' Then the publishers of the Encyclopedia Britannica put their concern at Mussolini's service, and Signor Villari rehashed his 'Vulgate' in the r926 supplement (II, 558-7r) and in the r929 and r938 editions of the 18

19

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power as a world historical event that would forever change the course of Italian history. The autobiography repeatedly emphasized the revolutionary character of the new regime. In the chapter "Thus We Took Rome," Mussolini began, "And now we were on the eve of the historic march on the Eternal City."' 1 Mussolini ran the March with the help of four paramilitary leaders-Emilio De Bono, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, Italo Balbo, and Michele Bianchi-who formed the National Directorate of the Fascist Party. Ever conscious of Roman imagery, Mussolini referred to this group as the "Quadrumvirate," and they were paraded out on celebratory occasions thereafter. Mussolini invoked spatial images to describe the preparations for the march: "Trusted Fascist messengers wove webs like scurrying spiders." The image of spiderwebs expanding over the Italian peninsula suggests how space contributed to the March as bluff. Mussolini chose Perugia as fascist command headquarters because "many roads flow to [Perugia] from which it is easy to reach Rome." 22 The logistics of the March depended on the quartering of fascist troops to the north, south, and east of Rome, so that they could march into the capital from all directions. Detachments of Fascisti were to march along the Tyrrhenian Sea, toward Rome, led by chiefs, all of them brave former officers. The same movement was to take place on the Adriatic side, from which direction was to be launched on Rome the strength of the low Romagna, March, and Abruzzi districts .... From middle Italy the squadrons already mobilized for the meeting at Naples were also to be directed upon Rome. 23 Evolving narratives of the March suggested solid blocs of fascists converging from all points on the Roman center. In The Awakening of Italy, Luigi Villari followed Mussolini's lead and described the March as an appropriation of Italian space. In two pages, he minutely outlined the train stops along the way to Rome and specified which gates of the city the particular squadrons would enter-details of the landscape that would be familiar to some Roman natives and maybe a few members of the city planning commission. The image of fascist squads pouring into Rome through all its gates Encyclopedia. Thus the Fascist version reached an immense public in all countries and became daily bread of any college professor who wanted, without any headaches, to become an 'expert' in Italian recent history" (44n). 21 Benito Mussolini, My Autobiography, trans. Richard Washburn Child (New York: Scribner's, I928), I73. 22 Ibid., I7 5. 23 Ibid., I74·

8o

Making the Fascist Self

is the most salient descriptive feature of Villari's account. 24 The imagery of the spatial convergence is as much a part of the story as the March itself. Ten years afterward, a display prepared for the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista) prominently featured a map of the March with all the troops converging on Rome (see Figurer).

G ,. 'I

/ ('

;

,. ,.

~li

e 0

Me d

,. ,. 'l>

J o n '\ o

e

Figure I. Itinerary of the March on Rome. Mussolini's commemorative pilgrimage of 1923 is superimposed. Itinerario della Marcia su Roma, ACS, PNF, MRF, b. 89, f. 49!. 24 Luigi Villari, The Awakening of Italy: The Fascist Regeneration (New York: George H. Doran, n.d.), 179-81.

Convergence and Commemoration

8r

An essential component of the story of the fascist revolution was that in contrast to other revolutions, such as the French, it was bloodless. The Roman nationalist daily, La Tribuna, did not hesitate to make this comparison and attack liberalism in the process. A front-page article proclaimed that the fascist revolution represented a unity of doctrine and action which shaped the "force of its passion," whereas "the excesses of the French Revolution were the products of the contradictions between ideas and sentiments, between the methods and ends of the revolutionaries. The ideas were new but the sentiments were old. The ends were liberal but the methods were tyrannical." Fascism gave Italy a "government," and not a "Committee of Public Safety. ms This fascist fiction belied the violence directed against socialists that occurred in the north in the years before October 1922. It also suggested that the fascists took liberties with the narrative of events when they continually referred to the "three thousand martyrs" for the revolution. October 30, 1922, yielded only skirmishes. The March was kept deliberately peaceful. Mussolini disbanded the fascist squads and ordered them to leave Rome soon after their imposing entrance. Before leaving, the squads participated in the first official ritual act of fascism.

The immense cortege first went to pay its tribute to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier on the monument to Victor Emmanuele; it then marched up the Via Nazionale, and the Via 24 Maggio to the Quirinale to pay homage to the King. The beautiful piazza was thronged with people, and every window and roof black with spectators. The King appeared at the balcony.... Slowly the hundred thousand Black Shirts ... marched past the King, whom they saluted in ancient Roman style, the right arm outstretched .... From the Quirinale, the Fascisti went to the Villa Borghese, where they were reviewed by Mussolini. 26 The visit to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the parade through the streets, the act of paying homage to the king set the pattern for action and reenactment that would dominate future commemorations of the March. It also suggested how future fascist spectacle would incorporate public space and social landscape. Redesigning the March on Rome The 1922 March was political fiction. Its reenactment in 1923 introduced the commemorative ritual genre to the Italian citizenry, a genre Italians 25 26

Rastignac, "28 ottobre," La Tribuna (Rome), 28 October 1923, r. Villari, Awakening, r82.

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Making the Fascist Self

would experience repeatedly in the ensuing years. The first anniversary commemoration, an instance of the numerous holidays and spectacles that would become part of daily life in fascist Italy, was a pastiche created from the cultural archives of Roman Catholic liturgy, military protocol, and the remnants of working-class organization. Mussolini wanted fascism as ideology to transcend previously existing political categories. In his Autobiography, he discussed, somewhat ingenuously, the problems he confronted as he tried to define the new fascist political community. It was necessary to imagine a wholly new political conception, adequate to

the living reality of the twentieth century, overcoming at the same time the ideological worship of liberalism, the limited and finally the violently Utopian spirit of Bolshevism. In a word, I felt the deep necessity of an original conception capable of placing in a new period of history a more fruitful rhythm of human life .... . . . This was my problem-to find the way, to find the moment, to find the form. 27 The Doctrine of Fascism articulated the solution to Mussolini's problem. The "form" Mussolini found was devoid of content. Fascism was a "general attitude towards life" based on a "spiritual" idea, a "creed.ms Fascism as a style of behavior dominated official discussion of fascist public ritual. A few days before the first anniversary commemorations began, Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini's biographer, paramour, and principal consultant on art, published a lengthy article in Il Popolo d'Italia on aesthetics and the new fascist regime. 29 Sarfatti wrote in the style of the educated upper middle class to which she belonged. Yet her prose was charged with the same sense of emotion that characterized the more mundane journalistic outpourings. Pointing to the ineffable quality of fascist public ritual, she began, "Where are certain artistic ideas born? Who can speak of their mysterious genesis?" She drew an explicit parallel between works of art and the regime as work of art: "But how were those events that are the true art of Fascism, the beauty of its exterior performances-! would dare to say, its rituals, part new and antique, part simple and solemn, stately and warlike-born?" She argued that fascism was mysterious and transcendent: "We ourselves, who assisted and participated in this birth, do not know." Gaining emotional fervor as Mussolini, Autobiography, 68. Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism, 4th ed. (Rome: Novissima, n.d.), IO, I2, 24. 29 On Margherita Sarfatti, see Philip Cannistraro and Brian Sullivan, II Duce's Other Woman (New York: Morrow, I993 ). 27 28

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she proceeded, Sarfatti located the birth of fascist ritual in recent and distant Italian history, and most important, in the Italian soul. The aesthetic of Fascism was born from necessity, from labor and from war. What is the black shirt? A memory of Garibaldi transformed by the ardor of war; from blood red to the black of death: from the ringing romantic fanfare of' 48 to the concentration of energetic realism .... But there is also in the black shirt the tradition of the labor and sweat of our workers, unskilled workers and provincial artisans who want to be able to work in their shops without dirtying themselves with dust and stains . . . . From where, if not from the atavistic memory-the rebirth of ancient religious spirits-through the sacrifice of war that takes sublime effort not to sink to the bestial-from where, if not from the dark whirlpools of the conscience of generations, the purist aesthetic that consecrates and celebrates these gestures of high and solemn life. 30 The planning of the first-anniversary commemoration owed more to rationality and expedience than to spirituality. In 1923, the regime appointed a National Planning Commission for the "Celebration of the Anniversary of the March on Rome" and began the process of institutionalizing the commemoration of its founding nonevent. A National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, or PNF) press communique announced that after "hardworking meetings" the members of the committee had designed a program orchestrated to the "minutest particulars." 31 Il Popolo d'Italia reported the scheduled events in typical hyperbolic language as the "most grand program," and the newspaper spent the days before the ceremonies trying to generate a public enthusiasm that was commensurate with the energy of its rhetoric. 32 The planning committee included members of the Fascist Party, the commissioner of Rome, Emilio De Bono and Michele Bianchi, and representarives from the National Association of Combatants and National Association of War Wounded. The central planning commission was located in Rome, but every city involved in the commemorations had local planning boards that kept the central committee informed of their activities. The local planning commissions consisted of the usual combination of fascists, military 30

Margherita G. Sarfatti, "Nei dodici mesi dall'avvento: L'artc," Il Popolo d'Italia (Milan),

26 October 1923, 4· 31

"Communique no.

50, f I2I, sf. 3,

I,

n.d.," Press Office, National Fascist Party, ACS, PNF, MRF, b.

I.

32 "II grandioso programma della cerimonia commemorativa della Marcia su Roma," Il Popolo d'Italia, 2 October I923, I. There is no suitable English translation of the term "grandioso." I have used the words "most grand," but they only partially convey the extremes that the Italian word suggests.

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Making the Fascist Self

persons, and notables. For example, Perugia's planning commissiOn consisted of the mayor, a general, two lawyers, the secretary of the local Fascist Party, two representatives of war veterans' associations, and a countess who was the president of the National Association ofWar Mothers and Widows. 33 The first anniversary commemoration centered on five sequential ceremonies that replicated the fascist march to power. The planning commission allocated the days between October 2 7 and October 3 r for the ceremonies. During this period of official festivity, public, military, and private buildings throughout Italy displayed the national flag. 34 The five cities chosen as ceremonial sites were sacred to an emerging fascist history and geographically located on the route to Rome. Cremona had the largest number of fascist martyrs; Milan was the birthplace of the fascist movement; Bologna was the site of intense socialist agitation that fascism had subdued; Perugia was command headquarters for the March; and Rome was the home of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier as well as the seat of national government. 35 The final event was scheduled for Rome on the morning of October 31, when Mussolini would repeat his triumphal entry into the city. According to the exuberant planning commission, a large parade "in the august presence of the sovereigns and Princes and all the aristocracy of blood, of thought, of heroism, and of labor in the Nation, will ensure the importance of an austere and grand symbolic synthesis of a reunited Patria walking toward its most glorious destiny." The parade route retraced the walk from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to the Palazzo Quirinale which the Blac,lopinione degli italiani sotto il regime> I9Z9-I943 (Rome: Laterza, I99I), 239-65. 57 On Italian participation in World War I, see Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy> I9I9-I9Z9 (rpt., Princeton: Princeton University Press, I987), 20-30.

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peace talks, where Woodrow Wilson refused to recognize Italy's claims to the spoils of war and upheld the national integrity of border territory between Italy and Yugoslavia. The combination of national glory and international humiliation made the Vittoria a rallying cry that echoed in Italian politics until the Second World War. The city of Fiume on the Italian-Yugoslavian border became such a cause ci:lebre that the flamboyant man of letters Gabriel D'Annunzio stormed it in an airplane and dramatically claimed it for Italy. Fascist propaganda fanned the flames of the Vittoria. The battle of Vittorio Veneto and the myth of Italian military victory was as essential a component of fascist catechisms and school textbooks as the March on Rome. Luigi Villari in The Awakening of Italy articulated, with some restraint, the Italian resentment of the League of Nations. Writing ofWilson's refusal to cede territory to Italy, he noted: There were no doubt reasons on both sides, and the Italian statesmen, people and Press were not blameless, but it cannot be gainsaid that while Britain and France obtained all that they wanted and annexed large and valuable provinces and colonies ... Italy was accused of Imperialism merely for demanding a few small districts on her own borders containing highly civilized Italian communities; every Italian claim, however just, had to be fought for acrimoniously ... before it obtained a grudging and incomplete recognition. There was, moreover, a tendency among the Allies to underestimate Italy's effort in the war, and its value for the common cause, to dispute the figures of her losses (which actually proved superior to the original estimates), and to attribute insufficient importance to the immense economic strain caused by war expenditure. 58 Under its entry for the Vittoria, the Dictionary of Fascist Doctrine (a pastiche of excerpts from newspapers, journals, and speeches that defined central concepts and events ofltalian fascism) printed the headlines of an article that had appeared anonymously in the Florentine nationalist newspaper La Tribuna. The excerpt proclaimed that Vittorio Veneto was a "military victory" because the defeat of the Austrian enemy made the German armistice necessary; a "political victory" because it led to the death of the AustroHungarian Empire and the "death" of a "type of State" that could no longer exist; and most important, "a spiritual and social victory. With it 58 Figures on casualties are always subject to dispute. Luigi Villari (The Awakening of Italy: The Fascist Regeneration [New York: George H. Doran, n.d.), 45) estimates that, out of a population of 3 8 million, 6oo,ooo Italians were killed and r million were wounded, with 22o,ooo permanendy disabled. For a modern historical account that places Fiume in the context of postwar social unrest and the emergence of fascism, see Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), rq-34.

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interventionist, voluntary Italy, will make itself fascist and will give to Europe and to civilization a new type of Society and State." 59 The commemoration of the Vittoria predated fascism. November 4, Armistice Day on the Italian front, became a legal holiday in October 1922. 60 The official day of commemoration a week after the March on Rome linked the two holidays temporally. The regime and the party linked them substantively. For example, a National Fascist Party communique written for the sixth anniversary commemoration of the Vittoria began, "Italians! The sixth anniversary of the 'Vittoria' can be today a commemoration of the People by virtue of Fascism, which freed the 'Vittoria' from the perdition of a betrayal that lasted four years. " 61 From its inception, the commemoration of the Vittoria was a holiday for soldiers. By 1926, the holiday was government business and the Military Command of Rome published official protocols. Among the Commemorative activities were a mass in the Santa Maria degli Angeli in central Rome with all members of the government, including Mussolini, present; a parade down the Via Nazionale to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; and mandatory commemoration in military barracks in the afternoon. Fifteen hundred tickets were printed for the mass and issued to various dignitaries, and five thousand tickets were available for the "general" populace. As in the ceremonies that commemorated the March on Rome, the Fascist Party issued strict orders as to where troops and participants were to line up and how they were to enter the cathedral. The party mandated the participation of representatives of the Association of Mothers and Widows, the wounded, gold medal recipients, the navy, combatants, war volunteers, and Arditi. Each participant was required to dress in appropriate uniform. A military gun salute was provided as well as patriotic music. In the afternoon, the commemoration in the military barracks included music and cinema, a special distribution of wine, and free time until ten o'clock in the evening. At night, all military buildings were illuminated. 62 The Vittoria was celebrated in every city in Italy. The reports that local prefects sent to the Ministry of Interior describing public order conveyed the flavor of local commemorations. For example, in Avellino, a town in the south ofltaly which is not usually considered to have been an avid a participant in fascism, the prefect reported: 59

754·

Amerigo Montemaggiori, Dizionario della dottrinafascista (Rome: G.B. Paravia, 1934),

See "Pro-Memoria," ACS, PCM1937-39 3·3·3/f. 1558, sf. 8. PNF, Sesto Anniversario della Vittoria, 29 October 1924, ACS, PCM 1924 2.4-1/f. 2709. 62 Celebration dell'Anniversario della Vittoria, (4 November) 1926, "Comando della Divisione Militare di Roma (19), Ordine di Presidio N. 43,2 novembre 1926," ACS, PCM1926 2.4-1/f. 4021. 60 61

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3I

This morning associations of combatants followed the large imposing parade in which civil and military authority, invalids, spouses of the fallen, fascist and military organizations took part, and carried to the cemetery a crown of flowers for the tombs of the fallen. After the blessing given by the local clergy, and a letter written by the deceased Queen Margaret to the mothers of the fallen, the bulletin of the victory was read generating profound emotion among those present. The parade proceeded easily in perfect order. 63 The report from the prefect of Rovigo, a Venetian city, was surprisingly similar with the exception that the prefect was slightly more verbose. He began, "The historic date 4 November was celebrated worthily with processions and other festive activities in all the principal provincial centers. In this provincial capital, the ceremony has assumed the solemn character of patriotic manifestations. " 64 In addition to the usual round of visits to cemeteries and placing of commemorative plaques, the local bishop offered a funeral mass, which he interrupted before the consecration of the Eucharist to give thanks that the recent attempt to assassinate Mussolini had failed. The bishop expressed "joy" at the "salvation of the Duce that Divine Providence for the fourth time had preserved for the fortunes ofltaly." The prefect concluded on the same note as his counterpart in Avellino: "Public order was absolutely perfect." The tenth anniversary commemoration merited a book, Il Decennale, describing the evolution of the holiday and how it was celebrated throughout Italy. 65

Ibe joining of Generations The regime convened a committee in December I937 to plan the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Vittoria. Mussolini gave specific orders concerning the design of the commemoration. The events were to focus on the military nature of the occasion and to be purely national in scope, eschewing the local commemorations that were typical of fascist holidays. Mussolini directed that the presence of war veterans and youth. Italy's past and future fighters-was to dominate the ceremonies. The I938 commemoration of the Vittoria possessed a certain historical irony. The period from December I937, when the planning began, to November I938, when the last ceremony occurred, was replete with events that culminated in the downfall of the regime. In March I938, Hitler marched into Austria and 63 Celebration dell'Anniversario della Vittoria, (4 November) 1926, "Risposte dei Prefetti alla Circolare telegrafica 31 ottobre 26 n. 27097," ACS, PCM 1926 2.4-1/f. 4021. 64 Ibid. 65 II decennale: X anniversario della Vittoria, anno VII dell'era fascista, ed. Associazione Nazionale Volontari di Guerra (Florence: Nuova Edizione, 1929).

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Making the Fascist Self

virtually reversed the territorial gains of the Vittoria. The Italian-Austrian border was becoming insecure once more. The plans for the twentieth anniversary commemoration revived the spatial and dramaturgical techniques that had been used in the commemorations of the first anniversary of the March on Rome, particularly the technique of pilgrimage. The commemoration ceremonies, which spread out over days and included ritual reenactment at the battle scenes, colonized time and space. There were two sets of events: in June, the victory of the Piave was commemorated with a restaging of the battle march with the appropriate actors present; in November, the battle ofVittorio Veneto was reenacted with a pilgrimage from the Veneto that ended in Rome with a ceremony to honor the war dead. 66 The commemoration of the battle of the Piave lasted five days and consisted of ceremonies and speeches at all the major battle scenes. The ceremonies began on June I 5 in the town of Nervesa with the dedication of a battlefield in memory of the war dead. On the banks of the Piave, a cohort of twenty-four hundred men who had been wounded in the war formed a guard of honor. On the next day, a military column departed for Monte Grappa where a mass was offered and a crown of laurel was left on the tomb of Maresciallo Giardino, commander of the troops at Grappa. The ceremonial troops proceeded to Redipuglia, where the duke of Aosta, the commander of the third Armata, was buried. The pilgrimage to this site included a ceremony organized around the leaving of laurel wreaths on the tombs of sixty thousand unknown soldiers. As the commemorative week proceeded, the ceremonies became more elaborate. The third day began with a mass in the fields in honor of those who had died in the air strikes in the Veneto. The mass was celebrated at the monument to Francesco Baracca in Montello, and an air show took place over the fields. The commemorations moved on to Padua, where General Carlo Del Croix, president of the National Association of War Wounded and Incapacitated, inaugurated a "Pavilion of the Victory" with a speech that was broadcast on Italian radio. The events concluded with a spectacle of light against the dark-the "Sacred Night on the Piave." Floodlights and fireworks illuminated the low-lying mountains that formed the Italian border where the fighting took place. The grand finale began in Treviso with a "solemn full-dress parade" in which Fascist Party members, fascist youth groups, and combatant associations participated. Gabriele D'Annunzio gave 66 I draw my accounts of the commemorations from "Verbali delle sedute 4/7/38" and "Verbali delle sedute 4/I4/38," Ministera della Guerra, ACS, PCM I937-39 I4-2/f. 3546, sf. 2-3; Ministera della Guerra, Ventennale della Vittoria: Battaglia del piaTJe IJ-23 Giugno (Milan: Turati-Lombardi, I938); and PNF, Foglio d'Ordini, Rome #2u, 22 October I938.

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a speech at Treviso that evoked the memory of his storming of Fiume. The day concluded with a grand regatta in Venice in the presence of the king to commemorate the men who had died at sea. The ceremonies of the Piave fused the nation and fascism. The prominence of the king coupled with the homage to the dead and the parading of the fascists, young and old, suggested a rapprochement between diverse factions. The masses once more imposed fascism on Roman Catholic liturgy. The diverse components of Italian culture and fascist culture were enlisted to suggest a national past, a fascist present, and a national/fascist future. Gabriel D'Annunzio's lyrical preface to the commemorative pamphlet describing the battle of the Piave captured the spirit of the occasion: D'Annunzio compared the river Piave to the "water of life" and ascribed to it the "regenerative" capacities of Catholic baptism. He concluded by referring to the initial Italian defeat at Caporetto: "And what was lost for days, will be reconquered for centuries. Long live Italy forever!" 67

Pilgrimage as Public Ritual The ceremonies of the Piave revived the technique of pilgrimage that had characterized the first anniversary of the March on Rome and had been eclipsed in succeeding celebrations. Pilgrimage was the leitmotif of the ritual events culminating in the commemoration in Rome on November 4· In the months between June and November, Hitler began to make aggressive moves into the rest of Europe while the Italians were busy fighting in Spain. By September 1938, Hitler was preparing to move into Czechoslovakia, and the vacillation of Mussolini between the liberal democratic regimes and the Axis powers placed him in the position of acting as mediator against Nazi aggression. In this role he traveled to Munich to negotiate on behalf of the Allies with Hitler over his prepared entry into the Balkans. Mussolini's trip to Munich was a pilgrimage with stops along the way in Padua and Vicenza and a grand celebratory event in Verona. Mussolini's pilgrimage through the north used his physical presence to convey to the Italian people that Italy and fascism were on a journey of international recognition. The trip to Munich was a personal triumph in diplomatic terms although Mussolini gained little in political terms. For the country, it was a pivotal moment because Italy could indeed have gone either way. 68 But less than a week later, on October 6, 193 8, it was clear in which direction Mussolini was heading when the Grand Council of Fascism introduced the racial laws. 69 A new enemy was created: the Italian Jewish 67 68 69

Ministera della Guerra, Ventennale della Vittoria, 7. See Mack Smith, Mussolini, 258-64. PNF, Foglio d'Ordini, Rome #214, 26 October 1938.

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Making the Fascist Self

population, which until that point had been one of the most highly assimilated Jewish populations in all of Europe and, in some quarters, avid supporters of the regime. 70 By October 25, when the commemorations began for the sixteenth anniversary of the March on Rome and the twentieth anniversary of the Vittoria, fascist public ritual was fully focused on mobilization for war. The Vittoria commemorations highlighted every theme of the mobilizing regime and summarized all that Mussolini was hoping to accomplish in terms of uniting the old generation of 1918 to the new generation of fascist youth and fighters. On October 28, members of the National Directorate of the Fascist Party deposited a crown of laurel in the sacristy of the chapel for the fallen at the Littorial Palace, party headquarters. 71 The insigne of the party was then moved from the headquarters accompanied by a troop of the militia, to the balcony of the palace in Piazza Venezia, where it would remain for the duration of the March ceremonies. After this ceremony, Achille Starace and the National Directorate accompanied a group of orphans of the fallen for the revolution to the palace to give Mussolini his membership card in the party for year seventeen of the regime. The duce's party card was marked number one. Next, the stone of the Fascist Association of the Families of the Fallen, Mutilated, and Wounded for the Revolution was taken to the Littorial Palace. Il Popolo d)Italia was uncharacteristically restrained in its coverage and emphasized the historical continuities rather than boldly proclaiming collective emotions.72 October 29 was devoted to the first anniversary of the founding of the Gioventu Italiana del Littorio (GIL), an umbrella group for several fascist youth organizations. Mussolini gave prizes in his office to the winners of the "Scudo del Duce" (Shield of the Duce), and the guard at the Palazzo Venezia for that day was furnished by members of fascist youth organizations. In the evening, a Balilla member spoke on the radio and the choir of the Littorio sang chants of the revolution and the war. Il Popolo d)Italia dramatically announced the "Feast of Italian Youth" and noted, "We will continue to march with the same Inflexible Energy." By October 30, the headlines were proclaiming that the first anniversary of the GIL was celebrated in Rome with "imposing warlike rites," as its youth were mobilizing for the coming war. On that symbolic day, too, the regime reaped some of the 70 On the state of Jews in Italy, see Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, vol. 2 (Milan: Mondadori, 1972), 287-401, 426-p. Mussolini's paramour in the 1920s and cultural adviser, Margherita Sarfatti, was from a prominent Venetian Jewish family and lost no time in leaving Italy after I 9 3 8. 71 PNF, Foglio d'Ordini, Rome #212, 28 October 1938. 72 II Popolo d'Italia, 28 October 1938, I.

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35

benefits of its colonial and imperial aspirations when it sent eighteen hundred rural families from Genoa, Naples, and Siracuse to public housing villages it had created in Libya. 73 The commemorations of I938 reached a crescendo between November I and November 4 when the focus shifted to the Vittoria itself. The first event was the displaying of all the flags of the Vittoria in Vittorio Veneto. The organization of events was in the hands of the Ministry of War, although the Fascist Party provided bodies to participate in the ceremonies. 74 In the evening of the first day of commemoration, the hills around the city were illuminated and there was artillery fire. A military choir sang "songs of war" in the town. On the following day, there was a "grand ceremony" in honor of the "fallen." A mass in the fields was said and the flags were blessed. General Carlo Del Croix spoke again. In the afternoon, a "Museum of the Battle" was inaugurated. On the next day, a "special train" carried the flags back to Rome. The journey to Rome took an entire day, and the train stopped in Treviso, Padua, Ferrara, Bologna, and Florence. At each stop, "military honors [were] organized under the intervention of formations of the National Fascist Party, the Combatant Associations, and the GIL" to "render homage" to the "flags of the Vittoria.ms On the morning of November 4, members of the National Directorate of the Fascist Party deposited a laurel wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and then went to Rome's central station to welcome the train with the flags. One hundred thousand troops were on hand to greet the flags and to parade down the center of Rome to the monument to Vittorio Emanuele, where a religious ceremony was held at the Altar of the Patria. Commemoration of the March on Rome continued until the regime fell in I943· But in many ways, commemoration effectively ended in I938 with the twentieth anniversary of the Vittoria. After I93 8, the commemorations were warlike and curiously celebratory in that they focused on Italy's future as a world military power. The regime was in need of more solidarity to generate enthusiasm and commitment to fighting, but the emotion of the populace was waning. To rally popular enthusiasm, in I938 Achille Starace introduced the "Reform of Custom," a decidedly perverse vehicle. Among Starace's "reforms" were, first, the replacement of the third-person "Lei" as the formal mode of address by the second-person plural "Voi"; the Roman salute to replace the traditional handshake; and the goose step at fascist parades, undoubtedly influenced by the growing presence of Nazi Germany. 73 PNF, Foglio d'Ordini, Rome #212, 22 October 1938, and It Popolo d'Italia, 30 October 1938, r. 74 "Programma delle cerimonie 10/10/38," ACS, PCM 1937-39 14-2/f. 3546, sf. 3/1a. 75 Ibid.

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Making the Fascist Self

There were also laws about female dress and a general injunction to get as many Italians into uniform as possible. But I 9 3 8 was Starace's last year as head of the National Fascist Party, and the reform may be viewed as a lastditch effort to save a sinking ship. 76 As the public communities of feeling were growing larger, they were losing whatever emotional appeal they had generated. Worsening economic conditions as evidenced by rising prices and declining wages throughout the I 9 3os generated a far greater sense of public urgency among Italian citizens than real or imagined enemies. In short, war was unpopular and the course Mussolini embarked on in I 9 3 8 required full national commitment. The support he had garnered in the sixteen years of the regime proved exceedingly tenuous as Italians were asked to sacrifice their bodies to a cause that appeared remote. The state without a nation ultimately proved rather ineffective when confronted with a constructed enemy, the plutocratic liberals of the Allied nations.

The March as Political Communication When Italian troops marched on Rome in I87o, they seized it from the French and drove the pope behind the Vatican walls. The first march on Rome completed the Risorgimento project and made Rome the capital of the new Italy. In contrast, the march of Mussolini's Black Shirts began the fascist project. This particular evocation of the March would have been accessible to the majority of the minimally educated Italian citizenry. The liberal Italian state builders did not emphasize the I87o march, and it became a schoolbook piece of dead history, a wasted cultural resource in the repertoire of possible symbolic actions on which the nation-state could project political love. The fascists were not quite so wasteful with their symbolic resources; the regime did not leave its March on Rome to textbooks, even fascist textbooks. The annual commemoration became an ongoing vehicle of nationstate building, a primary feature of the fascist cultural project. By narrating and renarrating, acting and reenacting the founding event, the regime merged the fascist present with its past and laid the foundation for its future. The annual dramatic reenactment in public space imposed the memory of the March even on those who wished to avoid it. The March spun a web, to invoke Mussolini's image, over the Italian terrain. From the Roman center, simultaneous commemoration occurred throughout Italy. Pilgrimages, 76 See Tannenbaum, Fascist Experience, 240-41, and DeGrazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, 224-25.

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37

whether of Mussolini, his emissaries, or Italian soldiers reenacting battle scenes, covered the landscape. During the 1920s and 193os, It Popolo d)Italia's narratives provided a running chronicle of regime intention; the emerging patterns of ritual genres served as recognizable forms of public events that signaled, even to those Italian citizens who were less than enthusiastic supporters of fascism, the ever expanding regime. As the consolidation period moved into the mobilization period, commemoration turned into celebration: the past dissolved before the future. While the regime was focused on celebrating itself through the annual commemoration of the March, the present was slipping from its grasp. In the late 1930s, all the absurdities and cruelties that have contributed to the popular cultural images of Italian fascism came to the fore-Starace's Reform of Custom, laws against the Jews, increased surveillance of subversive activity. It was also a period when everyone was fascist and no one was fascist. The regime made membership in the Fascist Party a requirement for public and some private employment, and Italians rushed to join with minimal ideological commitment?7 This was also the time Mussolini made the errors in foreign policy-most notably the alliance with Hitler-which brought Italy into an unpopular war that eventually destroyed fascism and unraveled whatever consensus the regime had enjoyed. The five themes that emerged in the accounts of the first anniversary commemorations evolved over the years and structured succeeding anniversary commemorations. First, the myth of the founding event was transformed by fascist rhetoric from a myth of national revolution into a myth of a new Roman empire. Fascist history, as recorded in the public spectacle of the March commemorations, deepened with time. As the years passed, the differences between the soldiers who gave their lives in World War I and the "fascist martyrs" who gave their lives for the revolution blurred. The destruction of the boundary between these two groups, coupled with the incorporation of the new generation of Italian and fascist youth, identified fascism as the regime that redeemed the tainted victory ofWorld War I and looked forward to new wars and new conquests. Empire completed the revolution. The proximity of the commemoration of the March to that of the Vittoria, the week between October 28 and November 4, provided an opportunity to create a space of temporal disruption that would implant the emerging narratives of the regime on the Italian people whether or not they joined in the spectacles of the piazza. The Roman salute, Mussolini's transformation from "Duce" to "Dux," the parading around Roman ruins, and the centrality of Rome itself as ritual stage were attempts to reinvent the grandeur of ancient Rome in modern 77

Tannenbaum, Fascist Experience, 68.

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Making the Fascist Self

Rome. Colonialism and empire, war and Romanism never completely eclipsed revolution in the commemoration of the March. Beginning in the I930s, with the imperialist aspirations of the regime on the rise, commemorations assumed a more militaristic hue. The mobilizations of the mid- I 9 3os were devoid of cognitive content and were pure displays of emotion in the service of generating national solidarity. Second, enemies and heroes evolved over time. Enemies create bonds of solidarity and intensify feelings of community. 78 In its early days, the regime clearly identified socialists as its enemy. The choice of ritual sites, such as Bologna, as well as official visits to and inaugurations of the Case del Fascia, which were in many cases old socialist union halls, suggested that the fascists had conquered the socialist enemy. As the regime became more entrenched, the socialists lost viability as an enemy. For example, "not words, but works," the slogan of the fifth anniversary commemoration, indicated that the only obstacle to work was the tendency toward lack of discipline among Italian workers. Enemies shifted from internal enemies to external ones, from groups to nation-states and their leaders. By the I930s, a new enemy emerged-the individualism touted by liberal capitalist regimes that threatened the fascist ideal of collectivity. Although anti-liberalism was salient in the Labor Charter and the Doctrine of Fascism, it was much more difficult to target as an enemy than socialists. In the years between the invasion of Ethiopia and Italian entry into World War II, national enemies multiplied and provided a focus for fascist emotional commitment. Anti-liberalism took the form of a generalized attack against liberal democratic regimes, which the fascists characterized as warmongers. In the I93os, France, Britain, the United States, and the entire League of Nations, as well as Mricans, Jews, and capitalists of all stripes, joined the amorphous communists, socialists, and liberals that had formed the early cadres of fascist enemies. In addition to looking outward to international enemies, the regime sought to identify exemplary fascist heroes. Michele Bianchi, one of four apostles of the regime listed in La nazione operante, died in I927 and was accorded a state funeral in Rome. Guglielmo Marconi, who figured prominently in the tenth anniversary commemorations, was an example of a new Italian fascist cultural hero. Third, the regime continued to appropriate the commonplace. Mussolini's visit to the Perugina factory and his frequent attendance at sporting events and concerts suggested that fascism had placed its stamp on both work and leisure, both public and private time. The annual dedication of 78 See Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith, "The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies," Theory and Society 22 (1993), I51-207.

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public works that occurred on October 28 replaced the commonplace of factory visits. The regime celebrated its new infrastructure on the anniversary of the March on Rome, an infrastructure that included roads, schools, dams, post offices, and other public buildings Italians would see and use on a daily basis. The day of faith and the wedding ring campaign represented a shift in the familiar pattern of the regime's appropriation of the objects of everyday life from the somewhat public to the intensely private. The ritual appropriation of marriage's principal public symbol underscored the regime's continuing attempt to draw the family, a salient Italian private identity, into the community of the state. Fourth, the regime persisted in its efforts to merge sacred and secular. The inclusion of the Catholic Church in fascist commemorative activity and the insertion of fascist ritual activity into Catholic liturgy was a fascist strategy to usurp a familiar Italian identity and ritual space which began in I923 with the mass in Piazza Siena. The prominence of Santa Croce in the reburial of the fascist martyrs and the numerous masses celebrated during the commemoration of the Vittoria point to the ongoing attempts to convert religious community into fascist community. The conflict between sacred and secular was frequently waged over the temporal position of holidays. By the I930s, a struggle emerged over who was worthy of more public holidays-the church or the state. Since holidays required public ritual, who commanded more of these events was a powerful form of ammunition in the struggle for the Italian self. A note written in I 9 26 to Mussolini from an official of the Ministry of Corporations, the body that regulated labor relations in fascist Italy, suggested the multiple dimensions of the struggle. The note asked Mussolini how the General Confederation of Industry was to justifY giving workers a day free from labor on October 28 and November 4, the respective dates of the March and the Vittoria, but force them to work on November I, All Saints' Day, the "holiest Catholic holiday." In addition, the three holidays meant "inconvenience" to Italian industry?9 The March and the Vittoria were not the only state holidays that trespassed on Catholic holiday terrain. For example, March 23, the date of the Founding of the Fascists, and April 2I, the Birth of Rome, were positioned so that they would inevitably interfere with Easter celebrations, which always occurred between the end of March and the end of April. Finally, the mobilization of bodies as cultural icons was expanded. From the first anniversary commemoration, the public display of mothers' bodies as living icons merged the public and private self and contrasted with the discourse of emotion and sexuality that permeated fascist political rhetoric. 79

"Appunto per S.E. II Capo del Governo," 22 October 1926, ACS, PCM 1926 2.4-1, f.

3904.

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The presence of the mothers and the widows was a constant in the commemoration of the March in particular and fascist public ritual in general. The regime used the exhibition of mothers' bodies to appropriate the idea of motherhood, a powerful Italian cultural ideal, and to make it resonate with the ideal of the nurturing and stable fascist state. In the ensuing years, the use of bodies as cultural icons became more complicated and articulated with an idea of a growing fascist public. Soldiers and fascists populated early commemorative events. But as the regime expanded its influence, it was able to mobilize more bodies, those of ordinary Italian men and women. As the Fascist Party grew to include youth and women's organizations, the boundaries of what would constitute a fascist public expanded. The mobilizations of the 1930s were the culmination of the massing of bodies in the service of public display and the purest type of community of feeling that the regime was able to create.

CHAPTER

5

Colonizing Time: Rhythms of Fascist Ritual in Verona

Ordinary and Extraordinary Events Nineteen thirty-eight was the last year of peace in Europe before the onset ofWorld War II. Verona, a city of 154,038 inhabitants nestled in the fertile agricultural region of the Veneto and on the train route through Brenner Pass into Germany, would play a pivotal role in Italian political and military affairs in the years between the German Anschluss and the Allies' liberation of Milan in 1945. 1 In the spring and summer of 1938, the political consequences of the German annexation of Austria were unclear, and fascist public life in Verona exhibited the slow and steady rhythm of previous years. Events such as Achille Starace's visit to honor the Veronese war dead and inaugurate the new Fascist House (Casa del Fascio), which were part of the standard repertoire of fascist public political practice in Verona and other Italian cities, filled the spring and summer of 1938. 2 With public display, fascist Verona sent its youth to commemorative activities in other parts of Italy, celebrated its women, bade farewell to troops leaving for Mrica, honored troops returning from Africa, and welcomed lower-ranking national fascist notables who were passing through on the inspection tours that were part of Fascist Party public ritual. 3 From the historical perspective of fifty 1 Fernando Zappi, Guida generate della citta e provincia di Verona (Verona: Federazione Fascista Veronese dei Commercianti, 1936), 448. 2 PNF, Federazione dei Fasci di Combattimento di Verona, "Documentario manifestazioni della Federazione Fascista dal 23 gennaio 1922 al 19 luglio 1942-xx" (typescript), 9294, ACS, PNF, MRF, b. 12 (Verona). ' These activities were not unique to Verona. During the same period in I938 in Frosinone, a small city in the center of Italy, there was a "Colonial Day," a ceremony to

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years, these events appear transparent as military mobilizations and dress rehearsals for the coming war. In the spring and summer of r 9 3 8, they were simply features of the topography of ritual landscape, part of the quotidian experience of life in fascist Italy. On September 26, 1938, Il Duce visited Verona. Mussolini had stopped at the train station a few times since he had come to power in 1922, most notably in September 1937 on his way to Berlin. But he had not made a formal visit to the city since 1921. 4 During the 1937 trip, Mussolini stopped in Verona on his return, and the crowds that greeted him displayed signs with "colossal" script that said, "DUCE! GRANT THE DESIRE OF THE BLACK SHIRTS OF VERONA THAT FOR 16 YEARS HAVE AWAITED YOU ON THEIR LAND"

and "DUCE! FOR 16 YEARS WE HAVE WAITED FOR YOU ANXIOUSLY." The presence of Gabriele D'Annunzio during the 1937 stop at the train station evoked memories of the storming of Fiume and the early days of the fascist movement. Mussolini never left the train station during his 1937 visit but promised to return the following year and spend an entire day in Verona. 5 Mussolini's return to Verona in September 1938 was part of his pilgrimage through the north linking the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Vittoria to the consolidation of the Rome/Berlin axis. The visit preceded by a few days his trip to Munich to negotiate the partitioning of Czechoslovakia. Mussolini returned from the German trip to a hero's welcome in Italy and international diplomatic recognition. Retrospectively, his visit to Verona became a historical irony. Within months, his diplomatic coup had the unintended consequence of paving the way for Hitler's further aggression in the Balkans. 6 On September 26 in Verona, the carnage and chaos of the Second World War was unimaginable. The spectacle of Mussolini's visit, its orchestration . and its photographic representation in newspapers and propaganda booklets, evoked an exuberant potency, an iconography of power that made defeat unthinkable. 7 The publicity that remains from Mussolini's trip to Verona evokes the images of power that have typically become associated with fasaward diplomas to young fascists and rural housewives, a "national gymnastic festival," and a visit from the duke of Bergamo to bestow a silver medal on a wounded soldier (R. Prefettura di Frosinone, "Avvenimenti e cerimonie autorizzate-Relazione Mensile," 13 June and 10 July 1938, "Cerimonie e manifestazioni," ACS, PCM 1937-39 3·3·9/f. 430). 4 C[arlo] Manzini, II Duce e Verona (dal I905 at I938) (Verona: C.E. AlbarelliMarchesetti, 1938), chronicles Mussolini's visits to Verona. ' Ibid., 64 , 6 5. 6 See Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (London: Granada, 1981), 258-61, and C. J. Lowe and F. Marzari, Italian Foreign Policy, I870-I940 (London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 315-23. 7 On the power of images to generate emotion, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989 ), 1-26, 317-77. Though Freedberg writes about erotic emotion, the link between sexuality and politics, particularly in Italy, is evident.

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cist public ritual in the popular imagination. 8 Dux-Fascismo Veronese romanticized Mussolini's relationship with Verona and began its history of Veronese fascism with a narrative of his "three encounters," his "dearest encounters," with the city before he came to power in 1922. Noting that "Mussolini has demonstrated in every time his predilection for Verona," Dux features a note from Mussolini to the head of the Veronese Fascist Party saying, "You know that I adore Verona. " 9 On one visit he was greeted by a "shower of roses and carnations"; "subtle poetry" marked another visit; and on another "the personal fascination of the Man fatally attracted even preconceived enemies. mo Mussolini had received the news of his mother's death in Verona in 1905 when he was an infantryman in the Italian army. This crisis presumably engraved Verona in his memory as the public arena of his personal loss. In a 1905 letter to his commanding officer, written before fascism was even an idea, Mussolini articulated the themes blending private and public life, mother and Patria, that dominated the ideological discourse of the regime and the mental lives of its strongest adherents.ll Thanking the officer for his expressions of sympathy, Mussolini wrote: Lengthy mourning and tears are suited to women-to strong men, to suffer and die-in silence-rather than to cry-to work and to act rightly-to honor domestic memories the most sacred of the Patria, not with sterile lamentations, but with worthy works. It is well to remember, to commemorate the heroes who with their blood cemented the unity of the Patria, but it is better yet to prepare ourselves in order to be stouthearted bulwarks, and not slothful descendants, against the Northern barbarians who would try to reduce Italy to a "geographic expression." These are my sentiments. 12 Carlo Manzini, the Veronese Fascist Party secretary, prepared Il Duce a Verona (The Duce in Verona), a glossy commemorative booklet of photojournalism that elevated Mussolini's 1938 voyage of return to the status of myth. Pointing to the uncertainty of the precise date (a date that international events determined), the booklet's opening narrative conveyed the "anxiety," "desire," and "hope" engendered by the expectation of Mussohni's visit. The local party leaders realized that the "specter of war" could hang over the "huge march of the masses" they wished to stage. The date 8 See, for example, Dux-Fascismo veronese: Storia ed opere del fascismo scaligero (n.d.) and Manzini, It Duce e Verona. 9 Dux-Fascismo veronese, 6. Despite Mussolini's adoration, sources document that il duce visited Verona only ten times between I905 and I938. 10 Ibid., 6, 8, 7. 11 Manzini, It Duce a Verona, II. 12 Ibid., I 2.

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was finally set for September 26, and Mussolini arrived the night before with Achille Starace, the head of the National Fascist Party, and Dina Alfieri, the minister of popular culture. When this threesome emerged the following morning from the Palazzo del Governo in the "beautiful September sun," the narrator linked the fascist past to the present and noted with nostalgia, "Maybe, in that moment, He [Mussolini] remembered that faraway evening of May 13, 1921, in which, from the same piazza, at the same point, descending from a reserved car he spoke to the faithful of fascism 'terzogenito' and the adoring Veronese crowd." 13 On the September morning in 1938, Mussolini rode down the central streets in a motorcade and reviewed battalions of fascist squads lined up between the Porta Palio and Porta Nuova, the two central gates of the city. At both gates, the city constructed enormous papier-mache Roman eagles, symbols of fascist power (Figure 8). Mussolini ended the first part of his journey in the Piazza Bra, which was filled to its capacity of two hundred thousand persons (Figure 9 ). The federal secretary in Verona, Sandra Bonamici, wanted to present Mussolini with a spectacle that superseded every other public performance he had experienced until that point. According to the account of journalist Cesco Tomaselli in the Milanese Carriere della Sera, Bonamici succeeded. Tomaselli described the scene: Mussolini was standing on a specially constructed podium. The Founder of the Empire raises his arm saluting this army of the people, the horns intone Giovinezza [the fascist anthem], the crowd explodes in a loud and formidable ovation, that joins the powerful acclamation of the lined-up formations that, without breaking ranks, shout their enthusiasm and throw fez, caps in the air, and wave weapons and sparkling daggers. In our voyages in the retinue of the Duce we never witnessed a similar scene. When Mussolini left the podium to go into. the Piazza Bra to speak to the multitudes, those that were rewarded by His very highest approval had a lump in their throat and were not able to say anything: they could only shout. Fascist Verona has succeeded in presenting to the Duce a great and new thing: it was not easy, if we think that eight city federals were in competition and all had sought to imitate each other in creativity as well as organization.14 Mussolini was "visibly struck" by the "spectacle" and the crowds. His visit reflected the form established during the annual commemorations of the March on Rome: he addressed the crowds; he paid his respects to the bishop, who was not a strong supporter of fascism; he met with fascist union 13 14

Ibid., 70. Ibid., 77·

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45

Figure 8. The fascist eagle. C[arlo] Manzini, Il Duce e Verona (dal I905 al I938) (Verona: C. E. Albarelli-Marchesetti, I 9 3 8).

leaders; he laid a laurel wreath at the monument to the fallen; he watched the "Roman step [passo Romano]" in the Piazza Dante (an I tali an version of the German goose step that was not well received in Italy); he visited the local hospital and met with troops leaving for Libya. 15 In the Roman amphitheater the Arena, Mussolini found a spectacle of 15

"Documentario manifestazioni," 95-96, ACS, PNF, MRF, b.

I2

(Verona).

Piazza Bra, Verona: Crowd awaiting Mussolini. C[arlo] Manzini, II Duce e Verona (dal I9DJ al I938) (Verona: C. E. 1938).

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"3 6,ooo souls" waiting for him-"8ooo fascist women, 8ooo rural housewives and laborers, 2o,ooo members of the GIL [fascist youth groups]. " 16 To begin the performance, the secretary of the party cried out to the crowd, presumably without sound amplification, "Fascist women, housewives, workers, youth of the Littorio, salute the Duce the Founder of the Empire!" Each group shouted the fascist chant "To us" as its name was called and then began a collective chorus of "Du-ce, Du-ce" that the singing of fascist anthems only briefly interrupted. Using the language of emotion that was now rote in all accounts of fascist spectacle, the narrative invoked the spell of the crowd as a blend of sexuality and romance. The Arena is throbbing totally with love and devotion toward Him, 3 6,ooo hearts are offered to Him as one heart, because they are at His disposal, because He consumes them, burns them at the fire of His genius. And the Duce does not know how to resist: He feels all the regret that He would leave behind Him if He would not at least say some words to this crowd that cry out in the last spasm of love, and He shows himself yet another time, after having signaled yet another time to leave. 17 The words Mussolini left behind were, "I want [ voglio] to tell you only that I will never forget the spectacle of faith and joy that you have offered me in this grand and sacred vestige of Rome. " 18 His choice of the word "voglio," the strongest expression of volition, reinforced the feeling of emotion and desire that the spectacle presumably invoked. The magnitude of the crowds and their photographic representation in newspapers and propaganda suggest that Mussolini's visit to Verona was indeed extraordinary. The photographs in newspapers and commemorative booklets are pictures of power; they have become the standard fare of popular perceptions of fascism and the regime's favored self-representation. The photograph of the crowds in the Arena, reproduced in national newspapers, is particularly illustrative of fascist photojournalism (Figure ro ). 19 The Arena, one of four remaining Roman amphitheaters in Italy, dominates the center of Verona. It served frequently as a stage for public political events during the fascist period. The city began staging operas there during the late nineteenth century, and when Mussolini arrived at the amphitheater, the mayor asked Il Duce to choose the opening operas for the coming theatrical year. Manzini, II Duce a Verona, 86. Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 See, for example, the front·page reproduction in II Popolo d'Italia (Milan), 27 Septem· ber 1938, r. 16 17

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Making the Fascist Self

Figure IO. L'Arena, Verona, on the day of Mussolini's visit. C[arlo] Manzini, Il Duce e Verona (dal I905 al I9J8) (Verona: C. E. Albarelli-Marchesetti, 1938).

Mussolini named Verdi's Tosca and Rigoletto, displaying the traditionalism that characterized the regime's aesthetic preferences. 20 The performance of the crowds in the Arena wed the spectacle of the fascist state to the memory of the Roman past and a popular theatrical form, the lyric opera. The photograph of the Arena, taken with a wide-angle lens, suggests raw mass. The black-and-white film reveals that the participants were seated according to the color of their uniforms to create a human halo effect and to form the word DUX in alternating colors. Individuals are invisible, and the image is one of pure force. In this chapter, I refuse the seduction of the iconography of power and focus on the ordinary, the customary, and the habitual. In her essay On Photography, Susan Sontag argued, "The ethical content of photographs is fragile.m 1 Sontag suggests that the moral content of a photograph diminishes as its audience becomes further removed from the event photographed. Time atrophies the emotional charge. Fascist propagandist photography reverses Sontag's proposition: the less likely a viewer is to have experienced a fascist event, the more powerful the fascist images appear. 22 20 21 22

Manzini, It Duce a Verona, 86. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, I978), 2I. The classic essay on the relation between fascism and photography is Walter Benjamin,

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The picture of the Arena was a depiction of fascist power that was not necessarily consonant with the regime's capacity to wield that power, a representation of power that did not necessarily equal a reality of power. The spectade of fascist power in Verona that Mussolini's visit generated was not part of the daily routine of ideological production in fascist Italy. As an extraordinary event, Mussolini's visit was a caesura that punctuated the rhythm of fascist public life in Verona and placed in relief the day-to-day process of fascist ideological production. This chapter explicitly addresses my proposition that ritual is a form of cultural action as it maps how fascist public rituals remade the patterns of civic life and community in Verona. Studies of public political ritual tend to assume what Clifford Geertz has described as the "myth of the exemplary center" and fail to explore how cultural policies conceived and enacted at the center are reenacted in the periphery. 23 Most Italians lived outside Rome, and local studies have the advantage of considering the dissemination of political meaning to the periphery. The ritual colonization of time in a peripheral city such as Verona provides yet another window on the process of fascist identity creation. 24 "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, I978), 2I7-SI· According to Benjamin, art forms such as cinema and photography, which can be reproduced in multiples, lack "aura," the contextual immediacy of older art forms. The absence of aura opens the door to polyvalence and permits art works to serve as vehicles of political manipulation. Departing from Sontag, I argue that political art becomes more manipulative the more temporally distant it is from events. 23 See Clifford Geertz, Negara (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I98o), 3-I8. Edward Shils, "Center and Periphery," in The Constitution of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I982), 93-I09, is social theory's preeminent formulation of the relation between center and periphery. Clifford Geertz, "Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power," in Local Knowledge (New York: Basic, I983), IZI-46, reformulates Shils's concepts and applies them to issues of symbolic politics. Geertz's position is diametrically opposite to the one espoused here: "The 'political theology' ... of the twentieth century has not been written, though there have been glancing efforts here and there. But it exists-or, more exactly, various forms of it exist-and until it is understood at least as well as that of the Tudors, the Majapahits, or the Alawites, a great deal of the public life of our times is going to remain obscure. The extraordinary has not gone out of modern politics, however much the banal may have entered; power not only intoxicates, it still exalts" (I43). 24 Local studies of fascism to date pay little attention to the cultural dimensions of public life and concentrate on political economy and labor problems. In general, regional studies focus on the regime's seizure of power, and their narrative accounts end in the mid-twenties; see, for example, Frank M. Snowden, Violence and Great Estates in the South of Italy: Apulia, I900-I9ZZ (New York: Cambridge University Press, I986); Frank M. Snowden, The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany, I9I9-I922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, I989 ); Simona Colarizi, Dopoguerra e facismo in Puglia, I9I9-I926 (Bari: Laterza, I97I); Anthony L. Cardoza, Agrarian Elites and Italian Fascism: The Province of Bologna, I90I-I9Z6 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I982); Paul Corner, Fascism in Ferrara, I9IJ-I925 (London: Oxford University Press, I975); Alice Kelik.ian, Town and Country under Fascism: The

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Making the Fascist Self

In 1942, the central office of the Fascist Party, in preparation for the third staging of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, requested local Fascist Party heads to prepare reports listing fascist war dead, public works created during the regime, and local newspapers and party organs. The fascist representative in Verona was excessively diligent and produced a typewritten calendar that recorded all public events sponsored by the Veronese Fascist Party from 1922 to 1942. This accidental data trove provides a picture of fascist public life in Verona. 25 The typewritten log illustrates how the Fascist Party colonized the public sphere in Verona and redrew the boundaries of civic and communal life to include the repeated experience of public party activities.

Fascism and Civic Life in Verona Geography and political history are often inextricable. Verona, a Roman fortress city, has had military importance from antiquity. Located in the northeastern corner of Italy at the foothills of the Dolomite Mountains near the Italian, Austrian, and German borders, the province of Verona was the site of battles that set the course of contemporary Italian history. Napoleon III and Emperor Franz Joseph signed the treaty that led to Italian unification without the Veneto at Villafranca in r859; the battle of the Piave, which resulted in the postwar humiliation ofltaly at Versailles, was fought in the Veneto. But Verona is more than a military bastion. Lying in the fertile Po basin, it is a major agricultural and wine producer. The Roman Arena is only one example of an architecture that spans centuries of Italian history. Shakespeare set Two Gentleman of Verona and Romeo and Juliet in the city, Transformation of Brescia, I9IJ-I926 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). A dated but still useful study that incorporates issues of civic life is "Convegno di studi promosso dall'Unione Regionale delle province Toscane, della provincia di Firenze e dall'Istituto Storico per Ia Resistenza," in Toscana, La Toscana net regime fascista (r922-I939) (Florence: Olschki, 1971). Regional studies of the Veneto are sparse. Michele Risolo, Itfascismo nella Venezia Giutia: Dalle origini alta Marcia su Roma (Trieste: La Vedetta Italiana, 1932), was written during the fascist period to garner support for the regime and only 650 copies were printed. Among postwar studies, see Elio Apih, Itatia fascismo e antifascismo nella Venezia Giutia (I9I8-I943) (Bari: Laterza, 1966); Silvio Tramontin, Cattotici, popotari e fascisti net Veneto (Rome: Cinque Lune, 1975); and Ernesto Brunetta, "Della grande guerra alia Repubblica," in It Veneto, ed. Silvio Lanaro (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), 9I3~I035· Maurizio Zangarini, Politica e societa a Verona in epoca fascista: Studi e ricerche (Verona: Cooperativa Editrice Nuova Grafica Cierre, 1986), the only full-length study of Veronese fascism, is highly schematic. 25 See note 2 for a complete citation to the log, hereafter cited as "Documentario manifestazioni," ACS, PNF, MRF, b. I2 (Verona). For a discussion of the log as a data source, see Methodological Appendix.

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suggesting Verona's reputation and place in Renaissance literary imagination. During the twenty years between the first and second world wars, politics took precedence over aesthetics. The Soave and Valpolicella wine continued to flow, the strains of lyric opera still echoed forth from the Arena, and tourists continued to visit Juliet's tomb. But Verona's location on the last express railway stop before the Brenner Pass and Germany made it a frequent destination for German and Italian visitors and an ideal location to enact the theater of state. The morning of January I I, I944, ensured Verona's place in the history of fascism. With the fascist regime gone and Mussolini's puppet government at Salo crumbling, Il Duce gave the order to execute the five members of the Grand Council, including his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, who had voted against him in the meeting of July 25, I943, that forced the king to ask for Mussolini's resignation. Verona was chosen as the site of the sham trial, the processo di Verona, that led to the executions, because of its proximity to Salo. This accident of geography left an ambivalent legacy. 26 Verona was "fascist" as all Italy was "fascist" during the period of the regime, but its level of commitment was weaker than that of other fascist cities. In I930, when the local Federal secretary, Giuseppe Righetti, gave the report from his annual inspection tour to Mussolini, Il Duce asked when Verona would be placed "in the hands of true fascists." 27 Verona's traditional "white" culture determined the short supply of "true fascists" -as well as "true" socialists. 28 An agrarian social structure with a weak industrial base and a strong commitment to Catholicism shaped the political affinities of the Veronese. The few histories of Verona that exist for the fascist period agree that it was "a-fascist" rather than anti-fascist. 29 Yet in the pre-I922 period, Verona had the first rural fascist organization in Italy and a larger number of supporters than Rome and Milan. 30 The Italian campaign during the First World War was fought largely in the Veneto. Former 26 On the events leading up to the processo, see Mack Smith, Mussolini, 342-5 5. For a popular account written by Ciano's lawyer, see Vincenzo Cersosimo, Dell'istruttoria alta fucilazione: Storia del processo di Verona (Milan: Garzanti, r 9 6 3 ). 27 Rapporti del Duce ai Segretari Federali, February 1930. "Relazione deli'On Giuseppe Righetti (Commissario straordinario) della Federazione Fascista di Verona," 5, ACS, PNF, MRF, b. 53, f. 123, sf. 3· 28 On the "white culture" and Catholicism's long-term effect in Verona, see Silvio Lanaro, "Genealogia di un modello," in It Veneto, ed. Silvio Lanaro (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), 24-60; on the conflict between socialism and Catholicism, see Emilio Franzina, "Operai, braccianti e socialisti nel Veneto bianco," in It Veneto, 701-59. 29 I rely principally on Zangarini, Politica e societa a Verona, and Tramontin, Cattolici, popolari e fascisti, as secondary sources in the account that follows. 30 Zangarini, Politica e societa a Verona, 30; this statement seems at variance with standard accounts. See, for example, Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, I9I9I929 (rpt., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 42-76, 443-44.

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Making the Fascist Self

battlefields did not immediately return to fertile farmland, and this led to a sharp drop in agricultural production and high unemployment rates in the postwar period. The "red" leagues' rhetoric of revolution appealed to the lowest level of agricultural workers ( braccianti), whereas the "white" leagues' promise of upward mobility attracted the sharecroppers ( mezzadri) and tenant farmers (fittavoli). Conflict arose between the red and white leagues, and random acts of violence occurred. 31 The elections of I9I9, in which the socialists won the majority of votes in the city and the countryside, demonstrated that Catholicism was a cultural and not a political force. 32 On April 3, I9I9, in response to violence and conflict, a group of soldiers, arditi, students, professionals, and workers founded the Veronese Fascist Party. The reporter from It Popolo d)Italia who was present at the founding meeting noted that "the greater part of the adherents did not have a clear idea of fascist directions [emphasis added]; they were liberals, democrats, conservatives; they had instead the word 'Fascia' only in their sense of physical union and aimed at an alliance of all those considered the 'forces of order,' to confront the future elections under a new formula and with a new lineup." 33 The I 9 3 o federal secretary's report suggests that eleven years after its founding the Veronese Fascist Party still lacked clear ideas. Mussolini was troubled by this absence of focus, which he described as insufficient emotional commitment. Righetti began with a statistical report. In I930, the province ofVerona had a population of 583,569 distributed among ninetythree communes. There were I05 units of the Fighting Fascists (Fasci di Combattimento ), consisting of approximately fourteen thousand members, of which only four thousand belonged to the "Old Guard" (men who were in the Fascist Party before I922). 34 The federal secretary took comfort in the fact that "the statistics on positions occupied by fascists demonstrate that in reality a true work of penetration has been completed." He painted a similarly optimistic picture of the fascist commitment of women and university students. The fascist women's organization, with I,294 members, was "particularly useful in the countryside," where it provided instruction to peasant women. The 322 members of the fascist university group (Gruppo Universitario Fascista [GUF]), which the federal claimed represented 90 percent ofVeronese university students, actively participated in syndical meetings and remained in close contact with 31 32 33 34

Zangarini, Politica e societa a Verona, IOI-24. Tramontin, Cattolici, popolari e fascisti, II-I2. Dux-Fascismo veronese, IO. "Relazione dell'On. Giuseppe Righetti," I.

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the federation. The university students were preparing themselves for "future tests" and the assumption of party leadership roles. 35 According to Righetti, children and laborers posed a particular problem for Veronese fascism. Loyalty to Catholicism among schoolteachers and group leaders colored the fascist socialization process in the Veronese children's organizations-the Balilla, the Avant-Gardes, the Young Italians, and the Little Italians. The domination of Catholicism was more pronounced in the countryside than in the city, but there it was nonetheless real. Catholicism was an enemy that the regime was continually co-opting. Commitment to socialism and popularism, the forerunner of Italian Christian Democracy, was a never-ending threat to Veronese fascism, in which emotional attachment lagged behind organizational membership. The fascist unions managed to enroll only 6o percent of the provincial workforce, but Righetti optimistically noted: As to the efficiency of organizing, we can say that we are able to organize, to enroll, to interest; however are not able to say that the spirit is yet completely syndical; relics of populism and communism persist, but it is of little importance; the syndical world will be persuaded little by little and I judge that its complete spiritual transformation [emphasis added] will not be far. Agricultural landowners were more committed to fascism, and Righetti boasted that the conclusion of the agricultural pact was excellent and that 96 of the rro directors of the agricultural federations (federazione agricoltori) were "true fascists, of ancient enrollment. " 36 The federal displayed less optimism about economic matters than he had about spiritual. Verona lacked "a practical industrial leadership class, perhaps in consequence of its military servitude that only today has been completely broken away, but for many years held Verona and its hinterland locked in an unbreakable circle." 37 The general absence of industrial expertise contributed to financial problems within the debt-ridden Fascist Party and weakness in the local economy. The previous federal secretary, Mutto Plinio, had prepared a lengthy memorandum for the administrative secretary of the Fascist Party in Rome to explain why the accounts in Verona appeared disorderly. While protesting the honesty of the local party officials, he asked for increased subsidies from the national fascist party in Rome. 38 35

36

37 38

Ibid. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3· Federazione Provincial Verona,

1202.

16

December

1929,

ACS, PNF, Direttorio Serie I, b.

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Making the Fascist Self

The issue of national party subsidy made the financial situation of local parties particularly important. For example, the National Fascist Party contributed 5o,ooo lire to defray the costs of Mussolini's visit and 25o,ooo lire to build a Balilla House (Casa del Balilla). 39 In addition, the numerous public events and ceremonies were costly affairs. For example, in 1927, the celebration of the fifth anniversary of the March on Rome required 28,ooo additional lire and represented IO percent of the Veronese party's expenditures for that year. The Commune of Verona and the National Fascist Party each provided half the money.'0 In 1930, the Veronese party allocated 104, 241 lire to "large meetings" (adunate). The largest expenditures were for "artistic" items, such as medals, prizes, albums, and promotional posters, and the transportation of squads of participants from other parts of the Veneto.' 1 Verona employed about 25,000 workers, but the wool, furniture, and cotton industries were in crisis. Industrial salaries were going down and the situation was worsening. Unemployment was reported as 6,686 persons in industry and 3 ,ooo persons in agriculture. The cost ofliving was too high, as measured by the price of bread at 2. 30 lire per kilogram. Mussolini and the federal secretary agreed that the presence of opportunistic fascist businessmen, men who had enrolled in the party after 1927 to enhance their career prospects, was contributing to Verona's financial problems. The federal's solution was to find "old fascists," to throw the "profiteers" out of government, and to train a new generation of fascist leaders. In a conference held in July of the same year on "Veronese economic problems," Righetti argued that Verona needed to learn the necessary concordance of spirit and intentions-to use all the resources that derive from this concordance: from its topographical position, from its productive and agrarian capacity, from the technical skill of its inhabitants and from their financial availability, it will be able, in a relatively brief cycle of years, to completely transform itself and become one of the richest, most industrious and truly fascist provinces, in dynamic expression, in all Italy.'2 If local industry and government suffered from a lack of true fascists, the Catholic Church posed a more challenging problem. For indeed, its pro 39 Provincia di Verona, Un quadriennio di amministrazione fascista: Marzo I9JJ-XIIImarzo I939-XVII(Verona, 1939), rr. 40 Partito Nazionale Fascista Federazione Provinciale Fascista Veronese, "Rendiconto dei proventi e della spese dell'anno 1927," ACS, PNF, Direttorio Serie I, b. 1202. 41 Federazione di Verona, "Bilancio consuntivo a! 28 ottobre 1930-VIII," ACS, PNF, Direttorio Serie I, b. 1202. 42 Partito Nazionale Fascista, Federazione dei Fasci di Combattimento della Provincia di Verona, Problemi economici veronesi, Convegno Tenuto Nella Casa del Fascismo il 14 Luglio 1930-VIII, Processo Verbale Riassuntivo, 4, ACS, PNF, Direttorio Serie I, b. 1202.

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55

forma support of fascism could not be rectified by simply replacing the hierarchy. The bishop and the federal exchanged visits, but the bishop was "anti-fascist" and also "anti-populist." The bishop's antipathy to both parties gave the fascists a free rein to wrest the youth organizations from the hands of Catholic Action in the countryside. Catholic Action was not formally allied to the Popular Party. It was a lay organization of Roman Catholic moral activists founded in I 9 I 4 as an alternative to socialist voluntary and civic organizations.'3 It sponsored leisure-time activities with a Catholic moral focus for youth, women, and men. Until fascism came to power in I922, the Socialist Party was its principal competitor. But in I9JI, the Veronese Fascist Party targeted Catholic Action for surveillance and acts of violence because it was associated with the National Alliance (Alleanza Nazionale), a group of militant anti-fascist Catholics with a strong organizational presence in Verona. 44 Their leader was Lauro De Basis, who publicly argued that Catholic Action was a powerful tool of organizational opposition to fascism. The Alliance's propaganda stated: The Pope is in continual conflict with Fascism over the fundamental problem of the education of the young and the self-styled "Catholic" but really anti-Christian character of Fascism .... Catholic Action is the greatest organization outside of Fascism and is covertly anti-Fascist. At the moment of crisis it will be a valuable liaison and rallying point, not only against Fascism but also against possible subversive agitations let loose by the crisis itself. It is necessary to act in agreement with Catholic Action, not against it. 45 De Basis believed that propaganda statements should be scattered in the streets of a targeted locale (he died dropping leaflets from an airplane over Rome). The strong presence of the Alliance in Verona served to focus fascist attention on Catholic Action and exacerbated the regime's long-standing hostility to the organization. The country priests also were problematic, for they were hostile to fascism and frequently did not pay attention to fascist ceremonial orders. Their hostility took the form of a retreat to the more puritanical aspects of Catholic social practice. For example, in the municipality of Terrazzo, a parish priest 43 See Gianfranco Poggi, Catholic Action in Italy: The Sociology of a Sponsored Organization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), 14-29. 44 See Tramontin, Cattolici, popolari efascisti, 157,257-303. The fascist attack on Catholic Action was a national, and not a purely local, initiative; see Edward R. Tannenbaum, The Fascist Experience (New York: Basic, 1972), 193-94. 4 ; Lauro De Basis, Storia della mia morte, 9-10, cited in Richard A. Webster, The Cross and the Fasces: Christian Democracy and Fascism in Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 126-28. Webster describes Verona as a "strong point of militant Catholicism" and focuses on it in his story of De Basis and the Alliance.

I

56

Making the Fascist Self

was reported to the prefect because he refused to allow his parishioners to participate in a people's dance held to celebrate the Vittoria. The priest claimed that dancing was a form of immoral public behavior of which his bishop disapproved.'6 A fringe benefit of the strong Catholic culture was that the "demographic" situation was "excellent." Civic life in Verona provided a fertile terrain in which to cultivate a fascist public sphere and to offset the lack of emotional commitment that tarnished the Veronese Fascist Party in the eyes of the regime. The cityscape was an ideal setting for fascist public events on a grand scale, and Verona was small enough that even minor public events were impossible to avoid. A major street leads from the train station to the grand Piazza Bra in front of the Arena. Another street winds in front of the Arena to the Piazza dell'Erbe, a daily agricultural market that could be cleared at a moment's notice for fascist spectacle, and another turn leads into Piazza Dante in front of the prefect's offices. Verona also has a cathedral in a very narrow piazza and a magisterial military fort on the periphery. There were three major theaters, six amateur theater groups that included a (dopolavoro) company at the military fort, a philharmonic hall, and eight cinemas. Verona had two daily newspapers, L)Arena and the Gazzettino. L)Arena, founded in I866, was the principal daily, and in I 9 2 5, it became the official organ of the Fascist Federation of Verona. In addition, there were numerous small weekly and monthly papers associated with either the Fascist Party or Catholic organizations.'7 The citizens of Verona were accustomed to a public communal life and had a rich network of voluntary organizations that included sports clubs, literary clubs and choral societies, and various philanthropic associations allied with Catholic Action. These organizations provided a structure on which the fascists could graft their activities. 48 Although it is convenient to speak of the Fascist Party as though it was a unit, it was essentially a matrix of diverse organizations with different constituencies-women, children, youth, veterans, paramilitary groups.'9 In I942, the Veronese federal secretary, Antonio Bonino, reported that I87,423 youth, 62,2I9 women, I,729 Letter dated 7 November 1933, ASV, GP, 1929-40 (Verona 1933-480). Zappi, Guida generate, 396-99. 48 Zappi, Guide generate (400-406), lists forty-four organizations that are not directly affiliated with the Fascist Party. Scholars have never examined the well-known Tocquevillian proposition that relates civic association and democratic political practice with respect to nondemocratic political practice. Robert Putnam has recently developed an index that measures civic traditions and civic engagement in contemporary Italy (Making Democracy Work [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993], 120-62). Not surprisingly, the Veneto ranks high on civic virtue. 49 See The Fascist Party (Florence: Valecchi, 1937), 77-125, for a description of the fascist suborganizations. 46

47

Colonizing Time

I

57

university students, and 77,785 Fighting Fascists were enrolled in the local party.so Civic is the adjective that best captures the nature of the activities described in the annual reports of the various Veronese fascist organizations. For example, in 1926, the Veronese Federation of the National Association of Fighting Fascists (Associazione Nazionale Combattenti) collected money to provide aid to veterans and the unemployed and sponsored exhibits of the products of small industries to help promote them. 51 In 1928, the same organization subsidized the travel ofVeronese artisans to local fairs in other parts of Italy to display their goods, completed a census of fifty-four hundred artisans in the province of Verona, distributed free milk and antimalarial drugs, gave birthday presents to war orphans, sponsored the showing of war movies, gave out free books on the association, and participated in local and national public ceremonies. This pattern of activities remained the same throughout the 1930s. 52 The types of activities varied only slightly according to the constituency addressed. For example, as late as 1941, when Italy was already at war, the Veronese fascist youth organization maintained a full calendar of activities. There were summer camps for soldiers' children, home economics exhibits for young women, gymnastic contests, and amateur theatricals and musicals. 53 Choral singing was a favored activity. The organization's commander general compared singing to a sporting event in his description of a musical competition: It was a competition in which the values that characterize poetry and music ought, also and above all, to reflect other elements, that in music refines and tests itself, indispensable in the social life of a collectivity: those of profound intimate discipline that tying more voices, more sounds and personality, blending and enriching in the will of composition, without which no one attracts and no one gets lost or suppresses, brings to a more elevated 50 Partito Nazionale Fascista Federazione dei Fasci di Combattimento-Verona, "Numero degli inscritti alla Federazione dei Fasci di Combattimento per ciascuna categoria," ACS, PNF, MRF, b. 12 (Verona). 51 See Associazione Nazionale Combattenti, Relazione sul lavoro compiuto dalla Federazione Provinciale di Verona neWanno 1926 (Villafranca di Verona: Massagrande, 1926). 52 Associazione Nazionale Combattenti, Relazione schematica del avoro compiuto l 3112-1928-VII E.F. (Verona: Federazione Provinciale di Verona, 1928); Associazione Nazionale Combattenti, Consiglio provinciale della Federazione Provinciale di Verona dell'Associazione Nazionale Combattenti (Verona: Federazione Provinciale di Verona, 1932); and Associazione Nazionale Combattenti Federazione provinciale di Verona, Rapporto Provinciale-15 ottobre 1933-XI (Verona: Arena-Verona, 1933). 53 Partito Nazionale Fascista-Gioventu italiana del littorio, Ordine del giorno federate (Verona: Arena, 1941), 10, 15, 16.

I

58

Making the Fascist Self

harmony that in every expression, submissive or powerful, gentle or rough, has the sense and the force of solidarity. 54 The virtues the commander general ascribed to choral singing might also be found in the repeated experience of fascist public events. As the singing in unison generated a feeling of solidarity and collectivity, so too the daily, weekly, and monthly anticipation of Fascist Party events created a rhythm of ritual that had the potential to be more powerful than any single ritual event.

Classifying and Reclassifying Verona's Fascist Ritual The Contours of Ritual Using the commander general's musical metaphor, we might say that all of Italy engaged in public acts of choral singing during the fascist period. Public political events that took the form of ritual-repeated, expected, and stylized expressive actions-were the National Fascist Party's favored vehicles of solidarity. Local orchestrations with their variations in form and content suggest how the fascist cultural project played when away from the pomp and ceremony of the Roman center. The problem with fascist commitment in Verona induced the local party head to pay particular attention to public political events. Thus, in the years between I922 and I942, a distinct pattern of ritual emerged that set Veronese public life to a fascist rhythm. 55 During this period, the Veronese Fascist Party staged 7 2 7 events, ranging from small mundane affairs such as a local official's speech on a feature of fascist ideology to huge public spectacles such as Mussolini's visit. Of these events, relatively few exhibited the characteristics that popular culture and fascist propaganda have come to associate with fascist spectacle (see Table I). For example, only I6 percent (I I 8) were either described as large or had more than a thousand persons present. The log explicitly listed only IOI events (I4 percent) as taking place in public spaces. The favored public places for fascist events-the Arena, the central piazzas, the cathedral, and the train station-figured in only I 5 percent of fascist events; 20 percent took place in the local Fascist Party building or the military fort. There was no notation as to location of event in 50 percent ( 3 69) of the calendar entries, suggesting that the person who enIbid., 1. The typewritten log (see note 2) provided the data for the quantitative material in this section. For a description of coding procedures and the reliability of the log as a source of evidence, see Methodological Appendix. 54 55

Colonizing Time Tabler. Contours of fascist public events in Verona, 1922-1942 (n n Event > r,ooo persons present Spatial location Public space Central piazza Antiquity Church Train station PNF building Military building Temporal location Sunday Fascist holiday National holiday Ritual activity Parade Military review Rally in piazza Roman Catholic Mass Unveiling monument Ritual actors present Clergy Women Youth War veterans

I

59

= 727)

percent'

rr8

r6

IOI

14 6

44 19 29

15

3 4 2

93 48

I3

243

33 7 7

51 54

33 35

84 35

40 45 29 rr8 119

7

12

5

6

6 4

r6 r6

' Percentages do not add up to one hundred.

tered events in the log viewed many as ordinary and that their location was not noteworthy. The type of ritual activity displayed a similar pattern. Parades and military reviews each accounted for 5 percent ofVeronese fascist activities, and rallies for I 2 percent. Commemorative actions such as special Roman Catholic masses and the unveiling of monuments to local heroes accounted for 6 and 5 percent of activities, respectively. The presence of youth and war veterans at events was considered noteworthy and was reported in I 6 percent of events, whereas women and clergy took center stage in 4 and 6 percent of events, respectively. The dates of events offer a mirror of how the activities broke up the daily pattern of life in Verona. Thirty-three percent took place on a Sunday, a day with secular and religious meaning. The Italian state mandated that Sunday was a day of rest from labor; the Roman Catholic Church obligated its members to attend Mass on that day. Thus the events that occurred on Sunday interrupted customary leisure and religious practices. In a country

r 6o

Making the Fascist Self

such as Italy where even schooling was often an ad hoc event and truancy rates were high, weekly participation in the Roman Catholic Mass was one of the few cultural practices that had any ability to command a constituency. 56 Only 7 percent of events occurred on a specifically designated fascist or national holiday, suggesting that the Sunday events, a usurpation of religious ritual time, were part of a fascist strategy to undermine the hold the Catholic Church had on the mental lives ofVerona's citizens. 57 The temporal location of the majority of the events on what would ordinarily be work days indicates that the routine activities of the participants were often disrupted.

Genre The brief narratives recorded on each calendar entry were sufficiently descriptive and discrete to permit a classification of events according to ritual genre. Of the 727 events, celebrations made up the largest type (29 percent), followed by symposia (22 percent), commemorations (2r percent), demonstrations (r7 percent), and inaugurations (rr percent) (see Table 2). Veronese commemorations included ceremonies for national events such as the Vittoria and the March on Rome as well as funerals for public figures. The public event that marked the death of Michele Bianchi provides an example. On February 9, 1930, the log entry read: "In the Piazza dei Signori with austere and emotional displays the Black Shirts, the official representatives, and the people commemorated the admirable and exemplary figure of an Italian and a fascist of the Quadrumvirate Michele Bianchi. The Federal Commissioner Giuseppe Righetti spoke and after his speech the fascist appeal to the Dead was made." 58 Two days later the fifth page of L)Arena featured a report on the commemorative event. The "austere" and "solemn" "rite" was a "commemoration" of Bianchi, who was the "apotheosis" of fascist manhood and, according to Righetti, "a Man of the Revolution." Brigades of local fascist notables were present at the ceremony in the Piazza Dante, which faces the Veronese seat of government (Palazzo del 56 Verona is located in the northern corner of Italy, where education rates have been historically high in contrast to the center and the south. For statistics on schooling by region, see Marzio Barbagli, Educating for Unemployment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 71-101, and the dated but still useful Bolton King and Thomas Okey, Italy To-Day (London: James Nisbet, 1904), 236, and Herbert W. Schneider and Shephard B. Clough, Making Fascists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 83-85; on the Catholic Church and ritual space, see Herbert W. Schneider, Making the Fascist State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928), 216-17, and David I. Kertzer, "The Role of Ritual in State Formation," in Religious Regimes and State Formation, ed. Eric R. Wolf(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 85-103. 57 "Pro-Memoria," ACS, PCM 1937-39 3·3·3/f. 1558, sf. 8, summarizes the fascist legis· lation on holidays. 58 "Documentario manifestazioni," 30, ACS, PNF, MRF, b. 12 (Verona).

Colonizing Time

I

6I

Table z. Distribution of ritual events in Verona, I922-1942 (n=727)

Genre Commemoration Celebration Demonstration Symposium Inauguration Local/national interaction Local event/Local leader Local event/National leader National event/Local leader National event/National leader Period Matteotti (I-I-22 to 6-I0-24) Consolidation ( 6-I I-24 to 3-24-29) Consensus (3-25-29 to 9-8-35) Mobilization (9-9-35 to 6-Io-40) World War II (6-II-40 to 7-19-42)

n

percent

I 54 208 I22

2I 29 17 22 II

5 I8 33 30 I4

Governo ). After the applause for Righetti's speech died down, sounding trumpets signaled the beginning of the "fascist rite": The Honorable Righetti with strong voice and serious accent called: Comrade Michele Bianchi! The crowd responded with a single powerful shout: Presente! A minute of remembrance followed the call. Soon after, three drumbeats echoed and finally a bugle sounded announcing the end of the ceremony. 59 As the band played the anthem of the battle of the Piave, the crowd filed slowly out of the piazza and the members of the various fascist organizations returned to their party offices. Fascist celebration in Verona during r 9 3 2, the year of the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome, provides an example of the range of events that this genre subsumed on the locallevel. 60 In March, Luigi Razza, the head of the National Fascist Agricultural Union, visited Verona to celebrate a day dedicated to the Rural Housewives (Massaie Rurali). In April, eighteen propaganda meetings were held throughout the province by order of the National Fascist Party head. Verona celebrated the Birth of Rome (Natale di Roma) on April 21 with the "symbolic rite" of the leva fascista. In May, 59 "La Commemorazione del Quadrumviro Michele Bianchi," L'Arena (Verona), II February I930, 5· 60 "Documentario manifestazioni," 46-53, ACS, PNF, MRF, b. I2 (Verona).

r62

Making the Fascist Self

veterans, fascists, and the "people" enthusiastically participated in propaganda meetings (raduni di propaganda). On July 3, there was a "vibrant day of fascist faith." August saw the carabinieri (the military and civil police) march, a display of tactical maneuvers, and a military parade. On September 8, there was a "powerful fascist manifestation" to signal the changing of the guard at the Federation of Fighting Fascists. On October 9, an "extremely grand meeting" (grandiosa adunata) of youth was held to celebrate the presence of high-level National Fascist Party members at the annual young fascist celebration. On October 30, members of the fascist youth organization again staged a "vibrant patriotic manifestation" at the Teatro Nuovo. The last celebratory event of the year was the departure on December 9 of six hundred Veronese peasants ( rurali) for the fascist province of Littoria. Exporting unemployed peasants and workers to either the Mrican colonies or planned communities in Italy was a standard fascist strategy for dealing with the economic distress of the 1930s. 61 The farewell event included a mass in the cathedral, where the bishop imparted his blessings, and a ceremony at the train station, where the local Fascist Party head and the local leader of the agricultural union delivered speeches. 62 The Birth of Rome, April 2r, was a national fascist holiday that subverted Catholicism and socialism; it was celebrated every year in Verona through 1942. It was one of two holidays that the regime created, the second being the celebration of the founding of the Fascist Party observed on March 2 3. The timing of these holidays ensured that in some years they would conflict with Easter. 63 The fascist "feast of labor" aimed to attenuate whatever feelings remained for the socialists' celebration of labor on May r. 64 In a book on fascist holidays, two regime publicists drew an explicit comparison between the socialist and fascist celebrations: The feast of labor was celebrated in Italy-and is still celebrated in many countries-on the first of May. This feast, inspired by strangers, was in Italy, and is elsewhere, a day consecrated to the apology for class struggle: groups of workers with red flags, harangues of revolutionary agitators, and various incitements to indiscipline and disorder. Fascism, abolishing class struggle, necessarily had to cancel from the calendars the revolutionary feast of the first of May, but not to suppress from this feast of labor the blessing of God: fascism changed the date, making it coincide with the Birth of 61 On Veronese immigration to fascist colonies, see Zangarini, Politica e societa a Verona, 24-46. 62 "Documentario manifestazioni," 40-45, ACS, PNF, MRF, b. 12 (Verona). 63 "Pro-Memoria," 3-4. 64 May r had become a legal holiday in Italy in 1921. The fascists outlawed it in 1923, three months after assuming power. See "Comunicato per Stafani e per Ia stampa," ACS, PCM I923 2-4-I/f. II23.

Colonizing Time

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63

Rome, and bestowed upon it a new significance, because in human labor, as in the birth of the City, is the origin of all progress. On the occasion of the Italian Feast of Labor all work in offices and laboratories is suspended and intellectual work is interrupted, to participate in the celebrations of the Birth of Rome that take place with diverse and significant manifestations everywhere. 65 The ceremony of the leva, an integral part of the April 2 I events, underscores how celebration and commemoration diverged as ritual genres. 66 The leva was a rite of passage in which fascist youth passed from one level or suborganization of the Fascist Party to the next. The party strictly specified the ages at which one proceeded to the next stage: a youth became a member of the Balilla at age fourteen, an Avanguardista (Avant-Garde) at age eighteen, and a Universitario fascista (fascist university student) or Giovane fascista (Young Fascist) at age Twenty-one. The leva ceremony took place throughout Italy, with the largest one occurring in Rome before Mussolini; in Verona it was held in the Piazza Bra, the central square and next to the Arena. It began the local heads of the diverse fascist groups provided a list of the initiates to the federal secretary, who administered the "fascist oath" to the assembled youth. The secretary intoned the oath: "In the name of God and ofltaly I swear to follow the orders of the DUCE and to serve with all my force, and if it is necessary, with my blood, the cause of the fascist Revolution." He then asked the youths, "Do you swear it?" and they responded in unison, "I swear it!" 67 This ceremony treads on Roman Catholic ritual turf. Historian Emilio Gentile compares the leva to Roman Catholic confirmation: "From Catholic liturgy, for example, was taken the rite of the 'leva fascista,' instituted in I 9 2 T a 'rite of passage' similar to confirmation [ cresima], with which youth coming from the youth organizations, confirming their faith in fascism, they become 'consecrated fascists,' members of the party." 68 This analogy, though probably correct, fails to capture the temporal dimension of the Catholic and the fascist rite. Both are actions that signal the end of youth and the passage to active commitment in an ideological program. In the Catholic rite, the young person becomes a "soldier of Christ"; in the fascist rite, a "soldier of the regime." The second part of the fascist ceremony, the initiation rite, dramatized the linking of generations that was a vital part of fascist, as well as religious, 65 Ezio Bonomi and Arnaldo Caro, Celebrazioni patriottiche fasciste religiose (Milan: Nuova Italia, n.d.), 82. 66 Schneider and Clough, Making Fascists, I94, and Emilio Gentile, II culto del littorio (Rome: Laterza, I993), I29-30. 67 The description of the ceremony is found in Montemaggiori, Dizionario della doctrina fascista (Rome: G. B. Paravia, I934), 449-50. 68 Gentile, Culto del littorio, I 29.

I 64

Making the Fascist Self

continuity. Paragraph 84 of the regulations of the Young Fighting Fascists described the initiation ceremony: The symbolic form of the passage of ranks takes place in the following manner: a Black Shirt bestows on a Young Fascist, chosen from the ranks, a musket [ moschetto]; a Young Fascist, from among the oldest, bestows on an Avanguardista a scarf made of Roman colors. The bestowing of the musket and the scarf occurs simultaneously. Then the chosen youths exchange an embrace. In the name of the Duce, the Legions salute in one voice. 69 The annual performance of the leva drew Verona to the Roman center, created a new political generation of young Veronese fascists, and competed for ritual space with the Catholic Church. VArena's description of the I930 leva as a "rite of youth" suggests these themes: "For spirit of discipline, for fervor of enthusiasm, for rigid military austerity, the ceremony offered a spectacle of grand pride and truly assured the high character of the rite that formed the spiritual content of the celebration. mo Demonstrations figured in Veronese ritual life, but they were slightly less spectacular and somewhat more frequent than in the Roman center. For example, in I 9 2 5, there was an assassination plot against Mussolini. The calendar entry on November 5, I 9 2 5, read: "With a meeting of the masses in the Piazza dei Signori the Black Shirts and the people of Verona express their sentiments of indignation against the conspiracy against Mussolini."' 1 A day later, VArena recorded the event in its "Daily Chronicle" page Noting the "indignation of the Veronese people" over the plot against Mussohni, Federal Secretary Giovanni Eliseo announced a rally at nine in the evening of "fascists" and "citizens" in the Piazza Dante. 72 Two features of L'Arena's relatively short account are worthy of attention. First, the language in the newspaper and the log are strikingly similar, indicating that the party secretary may have used the newspaper to create the log. Similarities in phrasing occur repeatedly between the log and VArena. Second, the distinction between "fascists" and "citizens" appears consistently in the log, suggesting that the party was aware of its need to create a constituency. Demonstrations flourished in the mid-I930s, and as a genre of event, Montemaggiori, Dizionario, 450. "II rito della giovinezza," L'Arena, 22 April 1930, 4· 71 "Documentario manifestazioni," 13, ACS, PNF, MRF, b. 12 (Verona). 72 "L'indignazione del popolo veronese," L'Arena, 6 November 1925, Cronaca Cittadina, unpaginated. 69

70

Colonizing Time

I

65

they took many forms. The calendar entry recorded on October 3, 1935, the day Mussolini declared war against Ethiopia, captured the spirit of fascist demonstration as it evolved, as well as mimicking the demonstration held in the Roman center: "With a powerful manifestation of fascist fierceness and faith all the people of Verona participated in a gigantic rally [gigantesca adunata] on the occasion of the historic speech of the DUCE that declared war against Ethiopia.'m The passage of heads of state through Verona might also trigger a demonstration. On May 3, 1938, when Adolf Hitler passed through, the calendar read: With the largest meeting [grandiosa adunata] of the people-the crowd present was calculated at 3o,ooo persons-Verona gave its homage and offered its salute to the Chancellor of the Reich Adolf Hitler who came from the Brenner and was going to Rome for his historic meeting with the Emperor King and the DUCE. Also the little cities of the province welcomed the Head of the new Germany with sympathetic manifestations. 74

As a genre of event, demonstrations were eclectic as to content. What sets them apart as a distinct type is that they claimed the appearance of spontaneous collective emotion and tended to be large events. Symposia served as the ritual glue of fascist civic life in Verona, followed by inaugurations. The local Institute of Fascist Culture was frequently the scene of these typically small events where local notables offered lectures such as "The Mission of Rome in the World," author Ezio Maria Gray evoked the past in a discussion entitled "The Lessons of Zama," and an Italian senator addressed the women of Verona on "the Italian woman and the sanctions.'' 75 On September r6, 1934, the calendar noted a representative local inaugural event: "In the presence of the excellent Lojaconi, Undersecretary of State for Communications, and of the honorable Del Croix and Malusardi with a great manifestation of the people the House of the Wounded [Casa dei Mutilati] was inaugurated.'"6 On the day before the event, the Gazzettino described it in detail. The "patriotic ceremony" would "consecrate one of the most beautiful and holy works of [our] Province.'' Twelve thousand war wounded would descend on Verona after a pilgrimage to the nation's battlefields. Arriving at the train station early in the morning, the group would proceed to the Ristori Theater to hear speeches by local military leaders; then there would be a parade to the House of the Wounded for the inauguration ceremony; and the last part of the "rite" would be a 73 "Documentario manifestazioni," 68, ACS, PNF, MRF, b. " Ibid., 92. 75 Ibid., I?, 54, ?I. 76 Ibid., 5 8.

12

(Verona).

I

66

Making the Fascist Self

huge assembly (immensa adunata) in the Arena. 77 The inauguration of the House of the Wounded was a relatively large event for this genre of activity. The modest calendar entry on June II, I936, was more typical: "With a solemn ceremony the Federal Secretary inaugurated the flags and flames of the women's regional organizations. m 8 Symposia and inaugurations made up the largest proportion (34 percent) of Fascist Party activity. Small ceremonies that brought together discrete subsections of the party constituency were thus the core of Veronese fascist ritual. In contrast to the other genres of ritual activity, the prevalence of symposia and inaugurations depends on local conditions. Verona's longstanding civic culture suggest a general eagerness to participate in the public sphere which made its citizens receptive to symposia. 79 In March I936, the National Ministry of Press and Propaganda asked local prefects to identifY private citizens who would be willing to speak on behalf of the regime "in the event of mobilization. " 80 The prefect of Verona did not have difficulty finding a cadre of "good" and "excellent" speakers who were willing to volunteer their oratorical skills to work in local propaganda centers. In general, the volunteers came from the educated professional middle classes. A corp of Veronese lawyers, professors, teachers, and a few "war wounded" formed a circle of propagandists-in-waiting. The reconstruction of the Italian infrastructure was a regime directive that was dependent on local resources and capacities. Verona's massive rebuilding program between I922 and I942 contributed to the flourishing of inaugurations as a ritual genre. Verona built bridges, roads, hospitals, and schools; expanded its cemeteries; and restored artistic monuments such as Juliet's house and the medieval tower in the Piazza of Herbs. This physical transformation generated civic enthusiasm. For example, in March I 9 3 5, L'Arena's headlines boldly proclaimed, "For a greater Verona: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE PHYSICAL PLAN OF URBAN TRAM LINES: The Communal Council approved with a fervid manifestation of applause the deliberation of the Podesta that confronts and resolves this annoying problem." 81 In addition, certain forms of Fascist Party activity required new buildings. During this period, the Veronese Fascist Party built eleven summer colonies for fas77 "La casa del mutilato verra inaugurata domani presenti S.E. Lojacono e !'on. Delcroix," Gazzettino (Verona), 15 September 1934, internal page. 78 "Documentario manifestazioni," 75, ACS, PNF, MRF, b. 12 (Verona). 79 Putnam traces the roots of civic community in contemporary Italy from patterns established in the Renaissance. The Veneto is in the top third of Putnam's index of civicness. See Making Democracy Work, 97, 150. 80 See "Propaganda all'interno in caso di mobilizazione," N.U.P.I.E., ACS, MCP, b. 241, f. 91. 81 "La trasformazione dell'impianto tramviario urbana," L'Arena, 27 March 1935, 1.

Colonizing Time

r 67

cist children, three federal headquarters, ten Fascist Houses, and two regional headquarters. 82

Local/National Interaction The interaction between the local and the national-the "exemplary center" and the periphery-requires its own classification scheme. An analysis of Veronese events that determines whether they were local or national in scope and whether national leaders attended them elucidates the interaction between the central state, as represented by the National Fascist Party and regime in Rome, and local variations of national directives, yielding a fourfold classification scheme. Veronese events were (r) local with only local leaders participating; ( 2) local with national leaders present; ( 3) national with only local leaders present; (4) national with national leaders present. Genre did not necessarily determine an event's classification in the local/ national scheme. 83 A local event was restricted to Verona, such as a local religious holiday, an investiture in the Fascist Party, or a demonstration. A national event tied Verona to Rome and was celebrated throughout Italy, such as the annual commemorations of the March on Rome and the Vittoria and the celebration of the Birth of Rome. By the mid-r930s, the regime had developed a full calendar of secular holidays that required observance. In addition, Roman Catholic ritual days such as Christmas, All Saints' Day, the Immaculate Conception, and the Birthday of Saint Joseph were legal state holidays and fell under the rubric of a national event. Unique events such as demonstrations to support a national policy such as the invasion of Ethiopia also fell within this classification. A local leader was a member of the Veronese Fascist Party or local notable such as the mayor or the bishop. A national leader was a member of the fascist regime or National Fascist Party who either led or participated prominently in the event. Regime members varied from Mussolini to the heads of government ministries and fascist corporative bodies (see Table 2). The largest proportion of events (36 percent) were local. Many of the symposia fell into this category. For example, on January 9, 1930, "Professor Chinigo, noted student of Albanian problems, spoke at the Institute of Fascist Culture on the future of Albania." Commemorations also were 82 "Elencazione opere del regime realizzate nella circoscrizione territoriale della Federazione," memo prepared by Federal Secretary Antonio Bonino, ACS, PNF, MRF, b. 12 (Verona). " A cross-tabulation of genre with local/national interaction showed a statistically significant relation between the two (p = o.ooo ). In general, 66 percent of commemorative events tended to be national with local leaders present; 40 percent of celebratory events and 48 percent of symposia tended to be local with national leaders present; and demonstrations (54 percent) and inaugurations (42 percent) tended to be purely local events.

r68

Making the Fascist Self

frequently local, such as the entry on December 20, r930: "In the salon of the Fascist House a solemn remembrance of Guglielmo Oberdan was held for the young Fighting Fascists: orator Carlo Cilione." Demonstrations might be local events as well. For example, on September 2, r933, the log reported a "powerful nocturnal mobilization of 50,000 young fascists. The Prefect and the Federal reviewed the mobilized." 84 National events celebrated locally made up 2 7 percent of all events. These were frequently fascist holidays to which the National Fascist Party did not send representatives. For example, the r933 commemoration ofthe March on Rome in Verona was celebrated with the reading of Mussolini's message to the nation by a local leader. 85 The official visit was the principal symbolic vehicle that the regime and party used to draw the periphery to the center. Mussolini's I93 8 visit was the apogee of this political form. From the days that Roman emperors made their grand ceremonial entrances, the visit was a powerful ceremonial tool that disseminated authority from the center. 86 The presence of regime and national party leaders at purely local events stamped these occasions with a national and fascist character. National leaders were present at 268 Veronese Fascist Party events ( 3 7 percent of the total), only 3 3 ( 5 percent) of which were national events. The presence of the head of the Fascist Industrial Syndicate at the national convention of industrial leaders held in Verona on August 6, r93r,was in this category."' More typical was the I934 commemoration of the founding ofthe Fighting Fascists. The March 23, r934, calendar noted the presence of a government minister: Before a grand crowd of fascists and people the Honorable De Francisci, Minister of Grace and Justice, spoke in the Arena celebrating the anniversary of the Founding of the Fighting Fascists. Before the celebration the Minister rendered homage to the Fallen fascists and with the Prefect and the Federal Secretary as guides visited the House of Fascist Assistance. 88 The visits to local events far outweighed the visits to national events. Local events with national leaders present represented 3 2 percent ( 2 3 5) of all "Documentario manifestazioni," 30, 34, p, ACS, PNF, MRF, b. 12 (Verona). The absence of a national representative on this particular occasion does not signiJY regime indifference to local celebrations of national events. The prefects throughout Italy were required to file reports of these events with the Ministry of Internal Affairs; their reports are a rich archival source of local celebration. 86 Scholars of symbolic politics have tended to neglect this form of ritual action. On the Roman use of "triumphs and ovations," see H. H. Scullard, Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 213-18; on visits in Renaissance Venice, see Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 135-56. 87 "Documentario manifestazioni," 37, ACS, PNF, MRF, b. 12 (Verona). 88 Ibid., 55. 8'

85

Colonizing Time

r 69

events staged between 1922 and 1942. The regime and the party sent its most visible representatives to purely local events. In the years between 1922 and 1942, National Fascist Party leaders and prominent government ministers paraded in and out of Verona. The panoply ofleaders that arrived in 1933 provide an example. Giacomo Acerbo, the minister of agriculture, visited the agricultural fair; Achille Starace, national secretary of the Fascist Party, came to "celebrate" Veronese fascism; Luigi Razza, head of the Fascist Agricultural Union, presided over a meeting of national agricultural unions; the undersecretary of state for war made two visits, the first to participate in a military training session and the second to attend a local commemorative ceremony; and the national president of the Balilla visited the Veronese Balilla. 89 The average Veronese citizen would find it difficult to avoid a national leader's visit, which created spatial and temporal disruption as the leader paraded into the center of the city from the train station. VArena announced impending visits in front-page stories with bold headlines and reported on them afterward. National leaders invariably made speeches, laid commemorative stones, and cut ribbons, but it was their presence at an event which transformed it from a local expression of fascist solidarity to a symbolic occasion that bound Verona to Rome, periphery to center, and reinforced the idea that the fascist collectivity was the nation and the state.

Rhythms of Veronese Fascist Ritual Temporal Patterns

Historical period affected ritual action in Verona as it did in the Roman center. The greatest proportion of events occurred during the consensus and mobilization periods ( 63 percent versus 23 percent in the two earlier periods and 14 percent in the World War II period; see Table 2). The periodization of events provides a useful shorthand to the interplay of history and ritual events, although it distracts from the pattern of ritual repetition. A mapping of fascist events in Verona on a yearly basis reveals a distinct temporal pattern and suggests a momentum behind them (see Figure rr). Public events came in waves and displayed a generally bimodal distribution. 90 89 Ibid., 46-53. During this period there were twelve National Fascist Party heads. Starace occupied the post from 1931 until 1939 and made two additional visits to Verona, in 1938 to assist at commemoration ceremonies and in 1939 to inaugurate a dopolavoro sports arena. 90 I have not been able to attribute the anomalous drop in the number of events in 1939 to exogenous variables such as historical events, change in National Fascist Party leadership, or change in local party leadership. The typewritten log (see note :z.) provided the data for the quantitative material in this section.

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32 Year

Number of fascist-sponsored public events per year,

I922-I942

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

Colonizing Time

I7I

The first peak occurred in the mid-I92os when the regime was consolidating its political, social, and cultural agenda; the second peak occurred in the mid-I930s when it was beginning to create a new Roman empire in Ethiopia and to mobilize for war. The largest number of events occurred in I937 and I938, the height of the mobilization period. In general, the pattern showed an increase in the absolute number of events over time with a decline during the war years (I940-42). National and international forces drove the accelerating number of events and established the rhythm of ritual in Verona. Local exigencies shaped the formal patterning of ritual events. Commitment, Catholicism, and the necessity of creating new generations of fascists were the three problems Righetti outlined in his report to Mussolini. 91 Temporal variations in the size and genre of events, the local/national interaction, and generational presence suggest ritual corrections to the problems of Veronese fascist identity. Extraordinary events punctuated the rhythm of fascist ritual. Large public spectacles, where more than a thousand persons were present, represented a relatively small proportion of all events (see Figure 12). They began to increase during the consensus period and reached a plateau during the period of mobilization and the war. Between I922 and I93 5, Verona staged an average of three spectacles a year (range two to seven); between I 9 3 6 and I942, the city staged an average of nine spectacles a year (range four to fourteen). In I936, the first year that events increased, from five to twelve, the Veronese party sponsored an array of diverse events. In February, "a spontaneous and huge popular meeting of Black Shirts and citizens expressed their jubilation" over a military victory in Mrica. 92 Two months later, a "picturesque parade" of seven thousand peasants filled the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele to celebrate the Birth of Rome. 93 On May one hundred thousand persons convened in the same piazza to hear a radio broadcast ofMussolini's proclamation that the Italians had achieved a military victory in Ethiopia. The log entry read: 91 The problem of creating a new political generation was not unique to Verona. Bruno Wanrooij makes the point that Italian fascism in general found it difficult to create a replacement generation of fascists: "Despite the introduction of the propaganda slogan 'Make Way for Youth,' the problem of the renewal of the ruling class remained substantially unsolved. Eighty of the I45 new deputies appointed in 1934 had entered the fascist party before 1922; twenty-seven had joined that year, and only thirty-eight had become members at a later stage. Even among the leaders of the fascist student groups in 1931, 57·3 per cent had entered the party before 1923 whereas only 13 per cent had come from the fascist youth organizations" ("The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism as a Generational Revolt," journal of Contemporary History 22 [1987], 410 ). 92 "Documentario manifestazioni," 71-72, ACS, PNF, MRF, b. 12 (Verona). '' Ibid., 73-74·

Matteoti

1922-24

(;onsensus

Consolidation

1925-27

1928-30

1931-33

,\1obiHzation

1934-36

Year ____._Extraordinary -D- Ordinary Number of extraordinary and ordinary events, averaged over three-year periods,

1922-1942

1937-39

1940--42

Colonizing Time

I73

A multitude of roo,ooo persons, convened in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele from the most distant parts of the city, listened to the announcement of the Victory of the armies of Rome over the Ethiopian hordes and repeated with formidable impetuous emotion the shout of the DUCE. After the discourse of the DUCE a long parade gathered in the historic Piazza dei Signori, where the Prefect and the Vice Federal addressed the organizations and the people with inflamed words. 94 A few days later, on May 9, church and party united with a mass in the cathedral to give thanks for the Italian victory. The head of the diocese of Verona spoke with "noble eloquence" of the "sacrifice and faith of the Italian people" and proclaimed that the Ethiopian victory marked Italy and Rome as the center of "Roman-ness [romanita], latin-ness [latinita], and civilization. " 95 In the evening, a huge crowd gathered in the Piazza Bra to listen to Mussolini's radio broadcast proclaiming the new Italian empire; the remainder of the evening was spent in the singing of patriotic songs and torchlight parades. International and national events were the catalysts for the Veronese spectacles of 1936, Mussolini's 1938 visit, and extraordinary events in general.

Genre Patterns Commemorations and celebrations varied inversely during the fascist period (see Figure I 3 ). Commemorative events as a proportion of all events peaked between r 9 }I and I 9 33, began to decline in I 9 3 5, and dropped off sharply in 1940. Commemorations that focused on the fascist past were salient at the end of the period of regime consolidation but a less useful form of ritual in the period of mobilization; they dropped to 1922 levels during the war period. The fascist past gave way to the fascist future as a ritual vehicle. Celebratory events followed a steep upward trajectory, dipped briefly in I 9 3 5 probably in response to the increased number of demonstrations, continued a sharp rise in the late 1930s, and remained stable throughout the war period. Demonstrations, purely expressive events, were not the most prevalent form of Veronese public event, although they had a sharp rise from I 9 3 2 to I 9 3 5; then they leveled off and in I 9 3 8 began to decline sharply. During this period, the regime began to lay the groundwork for international aggression, and it is not surprising that demonstrations were a favored vehicle of mobilization and emotional commitment. The regime waged war on Ethiopia, declared Italy an Empire, withdrew from the 94 95

Ibid., 74· Ibid.

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